Full text of "A modern Utopia"

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A MODERN UTOPIA 
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of General Literature. 

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FROM FIJI TO THE CANNIBAL 

ISLANDS. B. Grimshaw. 

NAPOLEON : THE LAST 

PHASE. Lord Rosebery. 

WHAT I SAW IN RUSSIA. 

Hon. Maurice Baring. 
THE JOURNAL OF THE DE 

GONCOURTS. 

THE PLEASANT LAND OF 

FRANCE. R. E. Prothero. 

THE EYE-WITNESS. Belloc. 

EPISODES OF REVOLUTION 

IN BRITTANY. Lenotre. 

A TRAMP'S SKETCHES. 

Stephen Graham. 
A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. 

Dean Hole. 

15,000 MILES IN A KETCH. 
Captain R. ciu Baty. 
A POCKETFUL OF SIX- 
PENCES. G. W. E. Russell. 
THROUGH FINLAND IN 
CARTS. Mrs. AlecTweeriie. 
VOYAGE OF THE "DISCOV- 
ERY " (2 vols.). Capt. Scott. 
BURDEN OF THE BALKANS. 
M. E. Durham. 
SELF-SELECTED ESSAYS. 

Augustine Blrrell. 
FOLK OF THE FURROW. 

Christopher Holdenby. 
THE ALPS FROM END TO 
END. Martin Conway. 

A MODERN UTOPIA. 

H. G. Wells. 

PATH TO ROME. Belloc. 

WILD ANIMALS I HAVE 

KNOWN. Thompson Seton. 

THE GREAT BOER WAR. 

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A MODERN UTOPIA 



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H. G. WELLS 




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vJ 



A NOTE TO THE READER. 



THIS book is in all probability the last of a series 
of writings, of which disregarding certain 
earlier disconnected essays my Anticipations 
was the beginning. Originally I intended An- 
ticipations to be my sole digression from my art 
or trade (or what you will) of an imaginative 
writer. I wrote that book in order to clear up 
the muddle in my own mind about innumerable 
social and political questions, questions I could 
not keep out of my work, which it distressed me 
to touch upon in a stupid haphazard way, and 
which no one, so far as I knew, had handled in 
a manner to satisfy my needs. But Anticipa- 
tions did not achieve its end. I have a slow 
constructive hesitating sort of mind, and when 
I emerged from that undertaking I found I had 
still most of my questions to state and solve. 
In Mankind in the Making, therefore, I tried to 



6 A NOTE TO THE READER. 

review the social organisation in a different way, 
to consider it as an educational process instead 
of dealing with it as a thing with a future his- 
tory, and if I made this second book even less 
satisfactory from a literary standpoint than 
the former (and this is my opinion), I blun- 
dered, I think, more edifyingly at least from 
the point of view of my own instruction. I 
ventured upon several themes with a greater 
frankness than I had used in Anticipations, 
and came out of that second effort guilty of 
much rash writing, but with a considerable 
development of formed opinion. In many 
matters I had shaped out at last a certain per- 
sonal certitude, upon which I feel I shall go for 
the rest of my days. In this present book I 
have tried to settle accounts with a number of 
issues left over or opened up by its two pre- 
decessors, to correct them in some particulars, 
and to give the general picture of a Utopia 
that has grown up in my mind during the course 
of these speculations as a state of affairs at 
once possible and more desirable than the 
world in which I live. But this book has 
brought me back to imaginative writing again. 
In its two predecessors the treatment of social 



A NOTE TO THE READER. 7 

organisation had been purely objective ; here 
my intention has been a little wider and 
deeper, in that I have tried to present not 
simply an ideal, but an ideal in reaction with 
two personalities. Moreover, since this may 
be the last book of the kind I shall ever pub- 
lish, I have written into it as well as I can the 
heretical metaphysical scepticism upon which 
all my thinking rests, and I have inserted certain 
sections reflecting upon the established methods 
of sociological and economic science. . . . 

The last four words will not attract the 
butterfly reader, I know. I have done my best 
to make the whole of this book as lucid and 
entertaining as its matter permits, because I 
want it read by as many people as possible, 
but I do not promise anything but rage and 
confusion to him who proposes to glance 
through my pages just to see if I agree with 
him, or to begin in the middle, or to read 
without a constantly alert attention. If you 
are not already a little interested and open- 
minded with regard to social and political ques- 
tions, and a little exercised in self-examination, 
you will find neither interest nor pleasure here. 
If your mind is " made up " upon such issues 



8 A NOTE TO THE READER. 

your time will be wasted on these pages. And 
even if you are a willing reader you may require 
a little patience for the peculiar method I have 
this time adopted. 

That method assumes an air of haphazard, but 
it is not so careless as it seems. I believe it to 
be even now that I am through with the book 
the best way to a sort of lucid vagueness 
which has always been my intention in this 
matter. I tried over several beginnings of a 
Utopian book before I adopted this. I rejected 
from the outset the form of the argumentative 
essay, the form which appeals most readily to 
what is called the " serious " reader, the reader 
who is often no more than the solemnly im- 
patient parasite of great questions. He likes 
everything in hard, heavy lines, black and 
white, yes and no, because he does not under- 
stand how much there is that cannot be pre- 
sented at all in that way ; wherever there is 
any effect of obliquity, of incommensurables, 
wherever there is any levity or humour or diffi- 
culty of multiplex presentation, he refuses 
attention. Mentally he seems to be built up 
upon an invincible assumption that the Spirit 
of Creation cannot count beyond two, he deals 



A NOTE TO THE READER. 9 

jbnly in alternatives. Such readers I have 
resolved not to attempt to please here. Even 
if I presented all my tri-clinic crystals as systems 

of cubes ! Indeed I felt it would not 

be worth doing. But having rejected the 
" serious " essay as a form, I was still greatly 
exercised, I spent some vacillating months, over 
the scheme of this book. I tried first a recog- 
nised method of viewing questions from diver- 
gent points that has always attracted me and 
which I have never succeeded in using, the 
discussion novel, after the fashion of Peacock's 
(and Mr. Mallock's) development of the ancient 
dialogue ; but this encumbered me with un- 
necessary characters and the inevitable com- 
plication of intrigue among them, and I aban- 
doned it. After that I tried to cast the thing 
into a shape resembling a little the double 
personality of Boswell's Johnson, a sort of 
interplay between monologue and commentator ; 
but that too, although it got nearer to the 
quality I sought, finally failed. Then I hesitated 
over what one might call " hard narrative." 
It will be evident to the experienced reader 
that by omitting certain speculative and meta- 
physical elements and by elaborating incident. 



io A NOTE TO THE READER. 

this book might have been reduced to a straight- 
forward story. But I did not want to omit as 
much on this occasion. I.dp_not see why I 
should always pander to the vulgar appetite for 
stark stories. And in short, I made it this. 
I explain all this in order to make it clear to 
the reader that, however queer this book 
appears at the first examination, it is the out- 
come of trial and deliberation, it is intended 
to be as it is. I am aiming throughout at a 
sort of shot-silk texture between philosophical 
discussion on the one hand and imaginative 
narrative on the other. 

H. G. WELLS. 



CONTENTS. 



CHAP. PAGE. 

THE OWNER OF THE VOICE . 13 

I. TOPOGRAPHICAL . . . .16 

II. CONCERNING FREEDOMS . . 40 

III. UTOPIAN ECONOMICS ... 76 

IV. THE VOICE OF NATURE ' . . 1 1 6 
V. FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA . 137 

VI. WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA . 174 

VII. A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS . 210 

VIII. MY UTOPIAN SELF . . . 240 



CONTENTS Continued. 

CHAP. PAGE. 

IX. THE SAMURAI .... 250 

X. RACE IN UTOPIA . . . .306 

XL THE BUBBLE BURSTS . . . 337 

APPENDIX. SCEPTICISM OF THE 

INSTRUMENT . . . . 358 



A MODERN UTOPIA. 



THE OWNER OF THE VOICE 

r l ^HERE are works, and this is one of them, that are 
* best begun with a portrait of the author. And here, 
indeed, because of a very natural misunderstanding this 
is the only course to take. Throughout these papers sounds 
a note, a distinctive and personal note, a note that tends 
at times towards stridency ; and all that is not, as these 
words are, in Italics, is in one voice. Now, this Voice, and 
this is the peculiarity of the matter, is not to be taken as 
the Voice of the ostensible author who fathers these pages. 
You have to clear your mind of any preconceptions in 
that respect. The Owner of the voice you must figure 
to yourself as a whitish plump man, a little under the 
middle size and age, with such blue eyes as many Irish- 
men have, and agile in his movements and with a slight 
tonsoriafr baldness a penny might cover it of the crown. 
His front is convex. He droops at times like most of 
us, but for the greater part he bears himself as valiantly 
as a sparrow. Occasionally his hand flies out with a 



14 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

fluttering gesture of illustration. And his voice (which 
is our medium henceforth] is an unattractive tenor that 
becomes at times aggressive. Him you must imagine as 
sitting at a table reading a manuscript about Utopias, 
a manuscript he holds in two hands that are just a little 
fat at the wrist. The curtain rises upon him so. But 
afterwards, if the devices of this declining art of literature 
prevail, you will go with him through curious and inter- 
esting experiences. Yet, ever and again, you will find 
him back at that little table, the manuscript in his hand, 
and the expansion of his ratiocinations about Utopia 
conscientiously resumed. The entertainment before you 
is neither the set drama of the work of fiction you are 
accustomed to read, nor the set lecturing of the essay you are 
accustomed to evade, but a hybrid of these two. If you 
figure this owner of the Voice as sitting, a little nervously, 
a little modestly, on a stage, with table, glass of water and 
all complete, and myself as the intrusive cJiairman in- 
sisting with a bland ruthlessness upon his " few words " 
of introduction before he recedes into the wings, and if 
furthermore you figure a sheet behind our friend on which 
moving pictures intermittently appear, and if finally you 
suppose his subject to be the story of the adventure of his 
soul among Utopian inquiries, you will be prepared for 
some at least of the difficulties of this unworthy but un- 
usual work. 

But over against this writer here presented, there is 
also another earthly person in the book, who gathers him- 
self together into a distinct personality only after a pre- 
liminary complication with the reader. This person is 



THE OWNER OF THE VOICE. 15 

spoken of as the botanist, and he is a leaner, rather taller, 
graver and much less garrulous man. His face is weakly 
handsome and done in tones of grey, he is fairish and 
grey-eyed, and you would suspect him of dyspepsia. It 
is a justifiable suspicion. Men of this type, the chairman 
remarks with a sudden intrusion of exposition, are ro- 
mantic with a shadow of meanness, they seek at once to 
conceal and shape their sensuous cravings beneath egregious 
sentimentalities, they get into mighty tangles and troubles 
with women, and he has had his troubles. You will hear 
of them, for that is the quality of his type. He gets no 
personal expression in this book, the Voice is always 
that other's, but you gather much of the matter and some- 
thing of the manner of his interpolations from the asides 
and the tenour of the Voice. 

So much by way of portraiture is necessary to present 
the explorers of the Modern Utopia, which will unfold 
itself as a background to these two enquiring figures. 
The image of a cinematograph entertainment is the- one 
to grasp. There will be an effect of these two people 
going to and fro in front of the circle of a rather defective 
lantern, which sometimes jams and sometimes gets out 
of focus, but which does occasionally succeed in display- 
ing on a screen a momentary moving picture of Utopian 
conditions. Occasionally the picture goes out altogether, 
the Voice argues and argues, and the footlights return, 
and then you find yourself listening again to the rather too 
plump little man at his table laboriously enunciating 
propositions, upon whom the curtain rises now. 



CHAPTER THE FIRST 

TOPOGRAPHICAL 
I 

THE Utopia of a modern dreamer must needs differ 
in one fundamental aspect from the Nowheres 
and Utopias men planned before Darwin quickened the 
thought of the world. Those were all perfect and 
static States, a balance of happiness won for ever 
against the forces of unrest and disorder that inhere in 
things. One beheld a healthy and simple generation 
enjoying the fruits of the earth in an atmosphere of 
virtue and happiness, to be followed by other virtuous, 
happy, and entirely similar generations, until the Gods 
grew weary.- Change and development were dammed 
back by invincible dams for ever. But the Modern 
Utopia must be not static but kinetic, must shape not 
as a permanent state but as a hopeful stage, leading to 
a long ascent of stages. Nowadays we do not resist and 
overcome the great stream of things, but rather float 
upon it. We build now not citadels, but ships of state. 
For one ordered arrangement of citizens rejoicing in an 
equality of happiness safe and assured to them and their 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 17 

children for ever, we have to plan " a flexible common 
compromise, in which a perpetually novel succession of 
individualities may converge most effectually upon a 
comprehensive onward development." That is the first, 
most generalised difference between a Utopia based upon 
modern conceptions and all the Utopias that were 
written in the former time. 

Our business here is to be Utopian, to make vivid 
and credible if we can, first this facet and then that, of 
an imaginary whole and happy world. Our deliberate 
^intention is to be not, indeed, impossible, but most 
distinctly impracticable, by every scale that reaches 
only between to-day and to-morrow. We are to turn 
our backs for a space upon the insistent examination of 
the thing that is, and face towards the freer air, the 
ampler spaces of the thing that perhaps might be, to 
the projection of a State or city " worth while," to 
designing upon the sheet of our imaginations the pic- 
ture of a life conceivably possible, and yet better worth 
living than our own. That is our present enterprise. 
We are going to lay down certain necessary starting 
propositions, and then we shall proceed to explore the 
sort of world these propositions give us. ... 

It is no doubt an optimistic enterprise. But it is 
good for awhile to be free from the carping note that 
must needs be audible when we discuss our present 
imperfections, to release ourselves from practical diffi- 
culties and the tangle of ways and means. It is good 
to stop by the track for a space, put aside the knap- 
sack, wipe the brows, and talk a little of the upper 



i8 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

slopes of the mountain we think we are climbing, would 
but the trees let us see it. 

There is to be no inquiry here of policy and method. 
This is to be a holiday from politics and movements 
and methods. But for all that, we must needs define 
certain limitations. Were we free to have our in- 
trammelled desire, I suppose we should follow Morris 
to his Nowhere, we should change the nature of man 
and the nature of things together ; we should make 
the whole race wise, tolerant, noble, perfect wave our 
hands to a splendid anarchy, every man doing as it 
pleases him, and none pleased to do evil, in a world 
as good in its essential nature, as ripe and sunny, as 
the world before the Fall. But that golden age, that 
perfect world, comes out into the possibilities of space 
and time. In space and time the pervading Will to 
Live sustains for evermore a perpetuity of aggressions. 
Our proposal here is upon a more practical plane at 
least than that. We are to restrict ourselves first to 
the limitations of human possibility as we know them 
in the men and women of this world to-day, and then 
to all the inhumanity, all the insubordination of nature, 
W T e are to shape our state in a world of uncertain seasons, 
sudden catastrophes, antagonistic diseases, and inimical 
beasts and vermin, out of men and women with like 
passions, like uncertainties of mood and desire to our 
own. And, moreover, we are going to accept this 
world of conflict, to adopt no attitude of renunciation 
towards it, to face it in no ascetic spirit, but in the 
mood of the Western peoples, whose purpose is to 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 19 

survive and overcome. So much we adopt in common 
with those who deal not in Utopias, but in the world 
cf Here and Now. 

Certain liberties, however, following the best Utopian 
precedents, we may take with existing fact. We 
assume that the tone of public thought may be entirely 
different from what it is in the present world. We 
permit ourselves a free hand with the mental conflict 
of life, within the possibilities of the human mind as 
we know it. We permit ourselves also a free hand 
with all the apparatus of existence that man has, so 
to speak, made for himself, with houses, roads, clothing, 
canals, machinery, with laws, boundaries, conventions, 
and traditions, with schools, with literature and religious 
organisation, with creeds and customs, with everything 
in fact, that it lies within man's power to alter. That, 
indeed, is the cardinal assumption of all Utopian specula- 
tions old and new ; the Republic and Laws of Plato, 
and More's Utopia, Howells' implicit Altruria, and 
Bellamy's future Boston, Comte's great Western Re- 
public, Hertzka's Freeland, Cabet's Icaria, and Cam- 
panella's City of the Sun, are built, just as we shall 
build, upon that, upon the hypothesis of the complete 
emancipation of a community of men from tradition, 
from habits, from legal bonds, and that subtler servi- 
tude possessions entail. And much of the essential 
value of all such speculations lies in this assumption 
of emancipation, lies in that regard towards human 
freedom, in the undying interest of the human power 
of self-escape, the power to resist the causation of the 



20 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

past, and to evade, initiate, endeavour, and over- 
come. 



2 

There are very definite artistic limitations also. 

There must always be a certain effect of hardness 
and thinness about Utopian speculations. Their common 
fault is to be comprehensively jejune. That which 
is the blood and warmth and reality of life is largely 
absent ; there are no individualities, but only gen- 
eralised people. In almost every Utopia except, per- 
haps, Morris's " News from Nowhere " one sees hand- 
some but characterless buildings, symmetrical and 
perfect cultivations, and a multitude of people, healthy, 
happy, beautifully dressed, but without any personal 
distinction whatever. Too often the prospect resembles 
the key to one of those large pictures of coronations, 
royal weddings, parliaments, conferences, and gather- 
ings so popular in Victorian times, in which, instead 
of a face, each figure bears a neat oval with its index 
number legibly inscribed. This burthens us with an 
incurable effect of unreality, and I do not see how it is 
altogether to be escaped. It is a disadvantage that has 
to be accepted. Whatever institution has existed or 
exists, however irrational, however preposterous, has, 
by virtue of its contact with individualities, an effect 
of realness and Tightness no untried thing may share. 
It has ripened, it has been christened with blood, it 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 21 

as been stained and mellowed by handling, it has been 
Dunded and dented to the softened contours that we 
ssociate with life ; it has been salted, maybe, in a brine 
f tears. But the thing that is merely proposed, the 
hing that is merely suggested, however rational, how- 
ver necessary, seems strange and inhuman in its clear, 
ard, uncompromising lines, its unqualified angles and 
^rfaces. 

There is no help for it, there it is ! The Master 
iffers with the last and least of his successors. For 
11 the humanity he wins to, through his dramatic 
evice of dialogue, I doubt if anyone has ever been 
armed to desire himself a citizen in the Republic of 
lato ; I doubt if anyone could stand a month of the 
ilentless publicity of virtue planned by More. . . . 
iO one wants to live in any community of intercourse 
sally, save for the sake of the individualities he would 
icet there. The fertilising conflict of individualities 
; the ultimate meaning of the personal life, and all 
ur Utopias no more than schemes for bettering that 
iterplay. At least, that is how life shapes itself more 
nd more to modern perceptions. Until you bring in 
idividualities, nothing comes into being, and a Universe 
eases when you shiver the mirror of the least of in- 
ividual minds. 

3 

No less than a planet will serve the purpose of a 
lodern Utopia. Time was when a mountain valley 



22 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

or an island seemed to promise sufficient isolation for 
a polity to maintain itself intact from outward force ; 
the Republic of Plato stood armed ready for defensive 
war, and the New Atlantis and the Utopia of More in 
theory, like China and Japan through many centuries 
of effectual practice, held themselves isolated from 
intruders. Such late instances as Butler's satirical 
" Erewhon," and Mr. Stead's queendom of inverted 
sexual conditions in Central Africa, found the Tibetan 
method of slaughtering the inquiring visitor a simple, 
sufficient rule. But the whole trend of modern thought 
is against the permanence of any such enclosures. We 
are acutely aware nowadays that, however subtly con- 
trived a State may be, outside your boundary lines 
the epidemic, the breeding barbarian or the economic 
power, will gather its strength to overcome you. The 
swift march of invention is all for the invader. Now, 
perhaps you might still guard a rocky coast or a narrow 
pass ; but what of that near to-morrow when the 
flying machine soars overhead, free to descend at this 
point or that ? A state powerful enough to keep isolated 
under modern conditions would be powerful enough to 
rule the world, would be, indeed, if not actively ruling, 
yet passively acquiescent in all other human organisa- 
tions, and so responsible for them altogether. World- 
state, therefore, it must be. 

That leaves no room for a modern Utopia in Central 
Africa, or in South America, or round about the pole, 
those last refuges of ideality. The floating isle of La 
Cite Morellyste no longer avails. We need a planet. 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 23 

Lord Erskirie, the author of a Utopia (" Armata ") 
that might have been inspired by Mr. Hewins, was 
the first of all Utopists to perceive this he joined his 
twin planets pole to pole by a sort of umbilical cord. 
But the modern imagination, obsessed by physics, 
must travel further than that. 

Out beyond Sirius, far in the deeps of space, beyond 
the flight of a cannon-ball flying for a billion years, 
beyond the range of unaided vision, blazes the star that 
:s our Utopia's sun. To those who know where to 
;ook, with a good opera-glass aiding good eyes, it and 
three fellows that seem in a cluster with it though 
they are incredible billions of miles nearer make just 
the faintest speck of light. About it go planets, even 
is our planets, but weaving a different fate, and in its 
place among them is Utopia, with its sister mate, the 
Moon. It is a planet like our planet, the same con- 
tinents, the same islands, the same oceans and seas, 
mother Fuji-Yama is beautiful there dominating an- 
Dther Yokohama and another Matter horn overlooks 
the icy disorder of another Theodule. It is so like our 
planet that a terrestrial botanist might find his every 
species there, even to the meanest pondweed or the 
remotest Alpine blossom. . . . 

Only when he had gathered that last and turned 
ibout to find his inn again, perhaps he would not find 
his inn ! 

Suppose now that two of us were actually to turn 
about in just that fashion. Two, I think, for to face 
i strange planet, even though it be a wholly civilised 



24 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

one, without some other familiar backing, dashes the 
courage overmuch. Suppose that we were indeed so 
translated even as we stood. You figure us upon some 
high pass in the Alps, and though I being one easily 
made giddy by stooping am no botanist myself, if my 
companion were to have a specimen tin under his arm 
so long as it is not painted that abominable popular 
Swiss apple green I would make it no occasion for 
quarrel ! We have tramped and botanised and come 
to a rest, and, sitting among rocks, we have eaten our 
lunch and finished our bottle of Yvorne, and fallen 
into a talk of Utopias, and said such things as I have 
been saying. I could figure it myself upon that little 
neck of the Lucendro Pass, upon the shoulder of the 
Piz Lucendro; for there once I lunched and talked very 
pleasantly, and we are looking down upon the Val 
Bedretto, and Villa and Fontana and Airolo try to 
hide from us under the mountain side three-quarters 
of a mile they are vertically below. (Lantern.} With 
that absurd nearness of effect one gets in the Alps, we 
see the little train a dozen miles away, running down 
the Biaschina to Italy, and the Lukmanier Pass beyond 
Piora left of us, and the San Giacomo right, mere foot- 
paths under our feet. . . . 

And behold ! in the twinkling of an eye we are in 
that other world ! 

We should scarcely note the change. Not a cloud 
would have gone from the sky. It might be the remote 
town below would take a different air, and my com- 
panion the botanist, with his educated observation, 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 25 

might almost see as much, and the train, perhaps, 
would be gone out of the picture, and the embanked 
straightness of the Ticino in the Ambri-Piotta meadows 
--that might be altered, but that would be all the 
visible change. Yet I have an idea that in some obscure 
manner we should come to feel at once a difference in 
things. 

The botanist's glance would, under a subtle attrac- 
tion, float back to Airolo. " It's queer," he would say 
quite idly, " but I never noticed that building there 
to the right before." 

" Which building ? " 

" That to the right with a queer sort of thing " 

" I see now. Yes. Yes, it's certainly an odd-looking 
affair. . . . And big, you know ! Handsome ! I won- 
der " 

That would interrupt our Utopian speculations. We 
should both discover that the little towns below had 
changed but how, we should not have marked them well 
enough to know. It would be indefinable, a change in 
the quality of their grouping, a change in the quality of 
their remote, small shapes. 

I should flick a few crumbs from my knee, perhaps. 
" It's odd," I should say, for. the tenth or eleventh 
time, with a motion to rise, and we should get up and 
stretch ourselves, and, still a little puzzled, turn our 
faces towards the path that clambers down over the 
tumbled rocks and runs round by the still clear lake 
and down towards the Hospice of St. Gothard if per- 
chance we could still find that path. 



26 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

Long before we got to that, before even we got to 
the great high road, we should have hints from the 
stone cabin in the nape of the pass it would be gone 
or wonderfully changed from the very goats upon the 
rocks, from the little hut by the rough bridge of stone, 
that a mighty difference had come to the world of 
men. 

And presently, amazed and amazing, we should 
happen on a man no Swiss dressed in unfamiliar 
clothing and speaking an unfamiliar speech. . . . 



4 

Before nightfall we should be drenched in wonders, 
but still we should have wonder left for the thing my 
companion, with his scientific training, would no doubt 
be the first to see. He would glance up, with that 
proprietary eye of the man who knows his constella- 
tions down to the little Greek letters. I imagine his 
exclamation. He would at first doubt his eyes. I 
should inquire the cause of his consternation, and it 
would be hard to explain. He would ask me with a cer- 
tain singularity of manner for " Orion," and I should 
not find him ; for the Great Bear, and it would have 
vanished. " Where ? " I should ask, and " where ? " 
seeking among that scattered starriness, and slowly I 
should acquire the wonder that possessed him. 

Then, for the first time, perhaps, we should realise 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 27 

from this unfamiliar heaven that not the world had 
changed, but ourselves that we had come into the 
uttermost deeps of space. 



5 

We need suppose no linguistic impediments to inter- 
course. The whole world will surely have a common 
language, that is quite elementarily Utopian, and since 
we are free of the trammels of convincing story-telling, 
we may suppose that language to be sufficiently our 
own to understand. Indeed, should we be in Utopia 
at all, if we could not talk to everyone ? That accursed 
bar of language, that hostile inscription in the foreigner's 
eyes, " deaf and dumb to you, sir, and so your enemy," 
is the very first of the defects and complications one has 
fled the earth to escape. 

But what sort of language would we have the world 
speak, if we were told the miracle of Babel was presently 
to be reversed ? 

If I may take a daring image, a mediaeval liberty, 
I would suppose that in this lonely place the Spirit of 
Creation spoke to us on this matter. " You are wise 
men," that Spirit might say and I, being a suspicious, 
touchy, over-earnest man for all my predisposition to 
plumpness, would instantly scent the irony (while my 
companion, I fancy, might even plume himself), " and 
to beget your wisdom is chiefly why the world was made. 
You are so good as to propose an acceleration of that 



28 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

tedious multitudinous evolution upon which I am en- 
gaged. I gather, a universal tongue would serve you 
there. While I sit here among these mountains I 
have been filing away at them for this last aeon or so, 
just to attract your hotels, you know will you be so 
kind ? A few hints ? " 

Then the Spirit of Creation might transiently smile, 
a smile that would be like the passing of a cloud. All 
the mountain wilderness about us would be radiantly 
lit. (You know those swift moments, when warmth 
and brightness drift by, in lonely and desolate places.) 

Yet, after all, why should two men be smiled into 
apathy by the Infinite ? Here we are, with our knobby 
little heads, our eyes and hands a* 1 " 1 feet and stout 
hearts, and if not us or ours, still the ,n lless multitudes 
about us and in our loins are to come at last to the 
World State and a greater fellowship and the universal 
tongue. Let us to the extent of our ability, if not 
answer that question, at any rate try to think ourselves 
within sight of the best thing possible. That, after all, 
is our purpose, to imagine our best and strive for it, 
and it is a worse folly and a worse sin than presumption, 
to abandon striving because the best of all our bests 
looks mean amidst the suns. 

Now you as a botanist would, I suppose, incline to 
something as they say, " scientific." You wince under 
that most offensive epithet and I am able to give you 
my intelligent sympathy though " pseudo-scientific " 
and " quasi-scientific " are worse by far for the skin. 
You would begin to talk of scientific languages, of 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 2 q 

Esperanto, La Langue Bleue, New Latin, Volapuk, and 
Lord Lytton, of the philosophical language of Arch- 
bishop Whateley, Lady Welby's work upon Signifies 
and the like. You would tell me of the remarkable 
precisions, the encyclopedic quality of chemical termi- 
nology, and at the word terminology I should insinuate 
a comment on that eminent American biologist, Pro- 
fessor Mark Baldwin, who has carried the language 
biological to such heights of expressive clearness as to 
be triumphantly and invincibly unreadable. (Which 
foreshadows the line of my defence.) 

You make your ideal clear, a scientific language you 
demand, without ambiguity, as precise as mathematical 
formulas, and witl. every term in relations of exact 

Qi> J 

logical consistency v, ith every other. It will be a lan- 
guage with all the inflexions of verbs and nouns regular 
and all its constructions inevitable, each word clearly 
distinguishable from every other word in sound as well 
as spelling. 

That, at any rate, is the sort of thing one hears de- 
manded, and if only because the demand rests upon 
implications that reach far beyond the region of lan- 
guage, it is worth considering here. It implies, indeed, 
almost everything that we are endeavouring to repudiate 
in this particular work. It implies that the whole in- 
tellectual basis of mankind is established, that the rules 
of logic, the systems of counting and measurement, the 
general categories and schemes of resemblance and differ- 
ence, are established for the human mind for ever 
blank Comte-ism, in fact, of the blankest description. 



30 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

But, indeed, the science of logic and the whole frame- 
work of philosophical thought men have kept since the 
days of Plato and Aristotle, has no more essential per- 
manence as a final expression of the human mind, than 
the Scottish Longer Catechism. Amidst the welter of 
modern thought, a philosophy long lost to men rises 
again into being, like some blind and almost formless 
embryo, that must presently develop sight, and form, 
and power, a philosophy in which this assumption is 
denied.* 

All through this Utopian excursion, I must warn you, 
you shall feel the thrust and disturbance of that insur- 
gent movement. In the reiterated use of " Unique," 
you will, as it were, get the gleam of its integument ; 
in the insistence upon individuality, and the individual 
difference as the significance of life, you will feel the 
texture of its shaping body. Nothing endures, nothing 
is precise and certain (except the mind of a pedant), 
perfection is the mere repudiation of that ineluctable 
marginal inexactitude - which is the mysterious inmost 
quality of Being. Being, indeed ! there is no being, 
but a universal becoming of individualities, and Plato 
turned his back on truth when he turned towards his 
museum of specific ideals. Heraclitus, that lost and 

* The serious reader may refer at leisure to Sidgwick's Use of Words 
in Reasoning (particularly), and to Bos^nquet's Essentials of Logic, 
Bradley's Principles of Logic, and Sigwart's Logik ; the lighter minded 
may read and mark the temper of Professor Case in the British En- 
cyclopaedia, article Logic (Vol. XXX.)- I have appended to this book 
a rude sketch of a philosophy upon the new lines, originally read by 
me to the Oxford Phil. Soc. in 1903. 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 31 

misinterpreted giant, may perhaps be coming to his 
own. . . . 

There is no abiding thing in what we know. We 
change from weaker to stronger lights, and each more 
powerful light pierces our hitherto opaque foundations 
and reveals fresh and different opacities below. We 
can never foretell which of our seemingly assured funda- 
mentals the next change will not affect. What folly, 
then, to dream of mapping out our minds in however 
general terms, of providing for the endless mysteries of 
the future a terminology and an idiom ! We follow 
the vein, we mine and accumulate our treasure, but 
who can tell which way the vein may trend ? Lan- 
guage is the nourishment of the thought of man, that 
serves only as it undergoes metabolism, and becomes 
thought and lives, and in its very living passes away. 
You scientific people, with your fancy of a terrible 
exactitude in language, of indestructible foundations 
built, as that Wordsworthian doggerel on the title- 
page of Nature says, " for aye," are marvellously 
without imagination ! 

The language of Utopia will no doubt be one and 
indivisible ; all mankind will, in the measure of their 
individual differences in quality, be brought into the 
same phase, into a common resonance of thought, but 
the language they will speak will still be a living tongue, 
an animated system of imperfections, which every indi- 
vidual man will infinitesimally modify. Through the uni- 
versal freedom of exchange and movement, the develop- 
ing change in its general spirit will be a world-wide 



32 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

change ; that is the quality of its universality. I fancy 
it will be a coalesced language, a synthesis of many. 
Such a language as English is a coalesced language ; 
it is a coalescence of Anglo-Saxon and Norman French 
and Scholar's Latin, welded into one speech more ample 
and more powerful and beautiful than either. The 
Utopian tongue might well present a more spacious 
coalescence, and hold in the frame of such an unin- 
flected or slightly inflected idiom as English already 
presents, a profuse vocabulary into which have been 
cast a dozen once separate tongues, superposed and 
then welded together through bilingual and trilingual 
compromises.* In the past ingenious men have specu- 
lated on the inquiry, " Which language will survive ? " 
The question was badly put. I think now that this 
wedding and survival of several in a common offspring 
is a far more probable thing. 



6 

This talk of languages, however, is a digression. We 
were on our way along the faint path that runs round 
the rim of the Lake of Lucendro, and we were just 
upon the point of coming upon our first Utopian man. 
He was, I said, no Swiss. Yet he would have been 
a Swiss on mother Earth, and here he would have the 

* Vide an excellent article, La Langue Franqaise en ran 2003, par 
Leon Bollack, in La Revue, 15 Juillet, 1903. 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 33 

same face, with some difference, maybe, in the expres- 
sion ; the same physique, though a little better devel- 
oped, perhaps the same complexion. He would have 
different habits, different traditions, different know- 
ledge, different ideas, different clothing, and different 
appliances, but, except for all that, he would be the 
same man. We very distinctly provided at the outset 
that the modern Utopia must have people inherently 
the same as those in ''the world. 

There is more, p x erhaps, in that than appears at the 
first suggestion. * 

That proposition gives one characteristic difference 
between a modern Utopia and almost all its predecessors. 
It is to be a world Utopia, we have agreed, no less ; \ 
and so we must needs face the fact that we are to have 
differences of race. Even the lower class of Plato's 
Republic was not specifically of different race. But 
this is a Utopia as wide as Christian charity, and white 
and black, brown, red and yellow, all tints of skin, all 
types of body and character, will be there. How we 
are to adjust their differences is a master question, and 
the matter is not even to be opened in this chapter. It 
will need a whole chapter even to glance at its issues. 
But here we underline that stipulation ; every race of 
this planet earth is to be found in the strictest parallelism 
there, in numbers the same only, as I say, with an 
entirely different set of traditions, ideals, ideas, and pur- 
poses, and so moving under those different skies to an 
altogether different destiny. 

There follows a curious development of this to any- 

2 



34 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

one clearly impressed by the uniqueness and the unique 
significance of individualities. Races are no hard and 
fast things, no crowd of identically similar persons, but 
massed sub-races, and tribes and families, each after 
its kind unique, and these again are clusterings of still 
smaller uniques and so down to each several person. So 
that our first convention works out to this, that not 
only is every earthly mountain, river, plant, and beast 
in that parallel planet beyond Sirius also, but every man, 
woman, and child alive has a Utopian parallel. From 
now onward, of course, the fates of these two planets 
will diverge, men will die here whom wisdom will save 
there, and perhaps conversely here we shall save men ; 
children will be born to them and not to us, to us and 
not to them, but this, this moment of reading, is the 
starting moment, and for the first and last occasion 
the populations of our planets are abreast. 

We must in these days make some such supposition. 
The alternative is a Utopia of dolls in the likeness of 
angels imaginary laws to fit incredible people, an un- 
attractive undertaking. 

For example, we must assume there is a man such 
as I might have been, better informed, better disci- 
plined, better employed, thinner and more active and 
I wonder what he is doing ! and you, Sir or Madam, 
are in duplicate also, and all the men and women that 
you know and I. I doubt if we shall meet our doubles, 
or if it would be pleasant for us to do so ; but as we 
come down from these lonely mountains to the roads 
and houses and living places of the Utopian world- 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 35 

state, we shall certainly find, here and there, faces that 
will remind us singularly of those who have lived under 
our eyes. 

There are some you never wish to meet again, you 
say, and some, I gather, you do. " And One ! " 

It is strange, but this figure of the botanist will not 
keep in place. It sprang up between us, dear reader, 
as a passing illustrative invention. I do not know 
what put him into my head, and for the moment, it 
fell in with my humour for a space to foist the man's 
personality upon you as yours and call you scientific 
that most abusive word. But here he is, indisputably, 
with me in Utopia, and lapsing from our high specu- 
lative theme into halting but intimate confidences. He 
declares he has not come to Utopia to meet again with 
his sorrows. 

What sorrows ? 

I protest, even warmly, that neither he nor his sorrows 
were in my intention. 

He is a man, I should think, of thirty-nine, a man 
whose life has been neither tragedy nor a joyous adven- 
ture, a man with one of those faces that have gained 
interest rather than force or nobility from their com- 
merce with life. He is something refined, with some 
knowledge, perhaps, of the minor pains and all the civil 
self-controls ; he has read more than he . has suffered, 
and suffered rather than done. He regards me with his 
blue-grey eye, from which all interest in this Utopia has 
faded. 

"It is a trouble," he says, " that has come into my 



36 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

life only for a month or so at least acutely again. I 
thought it was all over. There was someone " 

It is an amazing story to hear upon a mountain crest 
in Utopia, this Hampstead affair, this story of a Frognal 
heart. " Frognal," he says, is the place where they 
met, and it summons to my memory the word on a 
board at the corner of a flint-dressed new road, an estate 
development road, with a vista of villas up a hill. He 
had known her before he got his professorship, and 
neither her " people " nor his he speaks that detestable 
middle-class dialect in which aunts and things with 
money and the right of intervention are called " people " ! 
approved of the affair. " She was, I think, rather 
easily swayed," he says. " But that's not fair to her, 
perhaps. She thought too much of others. If they 
seemed distressed, or if they seemed to think a course 
right " . . . 

Have I come to Utopia to hear this sort of thing ? 



7 

It is necessary to turn the botanist's thoughts into 
a worthier channel. It is necessary to override these 
modest regrets, this intrusive, petty love story. Does 
he realise this is indeed Utopia ? Turn your mind, I 
insist, to this Utopia of mine, and leave these earthly 
troubles to their proper planet. Do you realise just 
where the propositions necessary to a modern Utopia 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 37 

are taking us ? Everyone on earth will have to be 
here ; themselves, but with a difference. Somewhere 
here in this world is, for example, Mr. Chamberlain, 
and the King is here (no doubt incognito), and all the 
Royal Academy, and Sandow, and Mr. Arnold White. 

But these famous names do not appeal to him. 

My mind goes from this prominent and typical per- 
sonage to that, and for a time I forget my companion. 
I am distracted by the curious side issues this general 
proposition trails after it. There will be so-and-so, and 
so-and-so. The name and figure of Mr. Roosevelt jerks 
into focus, and obliterates an attempt to acclimatise 
the Emperor of the Germans. What, for instance, will 
Utopia do with Mr. Roosevelt ? There drifts across my 
inner vision the image of a strenuous struggle with 
Utopian constables, the voice that has thrilled terres- 
trial millions in eloquent protest. The writ of arrest, 
drifting loose in the conflict, comes to my feet ; I im- 
pale the scrap of paper, and read but can it be ? 
" attempted disorganisation ? . . . incitements to dis- 
arrange ? . . . the balance of population ? " 

The trend of my logic for once has led us into a face- 
tious alley. One might indeed keep in this key, and 
write an agreeable little Utopia, that like the holy 
families of the mediaeval artists (or Michael Angelo's 
Last Judgment) should compliment one's friends in vari- 
ous degrees. Or one might embark upon a speculative 
treatment of the entire Almanach de Gotha, something 
on the lines of Epistemon's vision of the damned great, 
when 



38 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" Xerxes was a crier of mustard. 
Romulus was a salter and a patcher of pattens. . . ." 

That incomparable catalogue ! That incomparable 
catalogue ! Inspired by the Muse of Parody, we might 
go on to the pages of " Who's Who," and even, with 
an eye to the obdurate republic, to " Who's Who in 
America," and make the most delightful and extensive 
arrangements. Now where shall we put this most 
excellent man ? And this ? . . . 

But, indeed, it is doubtful if we shall meet any of 
these doubles during our Utopian journey, or know 
them when we meet them. I doubt if anyone will be 
making the best of both these worlds. The great men 
in this still unexplored Utopia may be but village Hamp- 
dens in our own, and earthly goatherds and obscure 
illiterates sit here in the seats of the mighty. 

That again opens agreeable vistas left of us and right. 

But my botanist obtrudes his personality again. His 
thoughts have travelled by a different route. 

" I know," he says, " that she will be happier here, 
and that they will value her better than she has been 
valued upon earth." 

His interruption serves to turn me back from my 
momentary contemplation of those popular effigies in- 
flated by old newspapers and windy report, the earthly 
great. He sets me thinking of more personal and inti- 
mate applications, of the human beings one knows with 
a certain approximation to real knowledge, of the actual 
common substance of life. He turns me to the thought 
of rivalries and tendernesses, of differences and dis- 



TOPOGRAPHICAL. 39 

appointments. I am suddenly brought painfully against 
the things that might have been. What if instead of 
that Utopia of vacant ovals we meet relinquished loves 
here, and opportunities lost and faces as they might 
have looked to us ? 

I turn to my botanist almost reprovingly. " You 
know, she won't be quite the same lady here that you 
knew in Frognal," I say, and wrest myself from a sub- 
ject that is no longer agreeable by rising to my feet. 

" And besides," I say, standing above him, " the 
chances against our meeting her are a million to one. 
. . . And we loiter ! This is not the business we have 
come upon, but a mere incidental kink in our larger 
plan. The fact remains, these people we have come to 
see are people with like infirmities to our own and 
only the conditions are changed. Let us pursue the 
tenour of our inquiry." 

With that I lead the way round the edge of the Lake 
of Lucendro towards our Utopian world. 

(You figure him doing if.) 

Down the mountain we shall go and down the passes, 
and as the valleys open the world will open, Utopia, 
where men and women are happy and laws are wise, 
and where all that is tangled and confused in human 
affairs has been unravelled and made right. 



CHAPTER THE SECOND 

CONCERNING FREEDOMS 
1 

NOW what sort of question would first occur to two 
men descending upon the planet of a Modern 
Utopia ? Probably grave solicitude about their personal 
freedom. Towards the Stranger, as I have already re- 
marked, the Utopias of the past displayed their least 
amiable aspect. Would this new sort of Utopian State, 
spread to the dimensions of a world, be any less for- 
bidding ? 

We should take comfort in the thought that universal 
Toleration is certainly a modern idea, and it is upon 
modern ideas that this World State rests. But even 
suppose we are tolerated and admitted to this unavoidable 
citizenship, there will still remain a wide range of possi- 
bility. ... I think we should try to work the problem 
oat from an inquiry into first principles, and that we 
should follow the trend of our tune and kind by talcing 
up the question as one of " Man versus the State," and 
discussing the compromise of Liberty. 

The idea of individual liberty is one that has grown 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 41 

in importance and grows with every development of 
modern thought. To the classical Utopists freedom was 
relatively trivial. Clearly they considered virtue and 
happiness as entirely separable from liberty, and as 
being altogether more important things. But the 
modern view, with its deepening insistence upon indi- 
viduality and upon the significance of its uniqueness, 
steadily intensifies the value of freedom, until at last 
we begin to see liberty as the very substance of life j 
that indeed it is life, and that only the dead things, 
the choiceless things, live in absolute obedience to law. 
To have free play for one's individuality is, in the modern 
view, the subjective triumph of existence, as survival in 
creative work and offspring is its objective triumph. But 
for all men, since man is a social creature, the play of 
will must fall short of absolute freedom. Perfect human 
liberty is possible only to a despot who is absolutely and 
universally obeyed. Then to will would be to command 
and achieve, and within the limits of natural law we 
could at any moment do exactly as it pleased us to do. 
/All other liberty is a compromise between our own free- 
/ dom of will and the wills of those with whom we come 
( in contact. In an organised state each one of us has a 
more or less elaborate code of what he may do to others 
and to himself, and what others may do to him. He 
limits others by his rights, and is limited by the rights 
of others, and by considerations affecting the welfare of 
the community as a whole. 

Individual liberty in a community is not, as mathe- 
maticians would say, always of the same sign. To 

2a 






42 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

ignore this is the essential fallacy of the cult called 
Individualism. But in truth, a general prohibition in 
a state may increase the sum of liberty, and a general 
permission may diminish it. It does not follow, as these 
people would have us believe, that a man is more free 
where there is least law and more restricted where there 
is most law. A socialism or a communism is not neces- 
sarily a slavery, and there is no freedom under Anarchy. 
Consider how much liberty we gain by the loss of the 
common liberty to kill. Thereby one may go to and fro 
in all the ordered parts of the earth, unencumbered by 
arms or armour, free of the fear of playful poison, whim- 
sical barbers, or hotel trap-doors. Indeed, it means free- 
dom from a thousand fears and precautions. Suppose 
there existed even the limited freedom to kill in vendetta, 
and think what would happen in our suburbs. Consider 
the inconvenience of two households in a modern suburb 
estranged and provided with modern weapons of pre- 
cision, the inconvenience not only to each other, but to 
the neutral pedestrian, the practical loss of freedoms 
all about them. The butcher, if he came at all, would 
have to come round in an armoured cart. . . . 

It follows, therefore, in a modern Utopia, which finds 
the final hope of the world in the evolving interplay of 
unique individualities, that the State will have effectu- 
ally chipped away just all those spendthrift liberties that 
waste liberty, and not one liberty more, and so have 
attained the maximum general freedom. 

There are two distinct and contrasting methods of 
limiting liberty ; the first is Prohibition, " thou shall 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 43 

not," and the second Command, " thou shalt." There 
is, however, a' sort of prohibition that takes the form 
of a conditional command, and this one needs to bear 
in mind. It says if you do so-and-so, you must also 
do so-and-so ; if, for example, you go to sea with men 
you employ, you must go in a seaworthy vessel. But 
the pure command is unconditional ; it says, whatever 
you have done or are doing or want to do, you are to 
do this, as when the social system, working through 
the base necessities of base parents and bad laws, sends 
a child of thirteen into a factory. Prohibition lakes 
one definite thing from the indefinite liberty of a man, 
but it still leaves him an unbounded choice of actions. 
He remains free, and you have merely taken a bucketful 
from the sea of his freedom. But compulsion destroys 
freedom altogether. In this Utopia of ours there may 
be many prohibitions, but no indirect compulsions 
if one may so contrive it and few or no commands. 
As far as I see it now, in this present discussion, I think, 
indeed, there should be no positive compulsions at all 
in Utopia, at any rate for the adult Utopian unless 
they fall upon him as penalties incurred. 



What prohibitions should we be under, we two Uit- 
landers in this Utopian world ? We should certainly 
not be free to kill, assault, or threaten anyone we met, 



44 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

and in that we earth-trained men would not be likely 
to offend. And until we knew more exactly the Utopian 
idea of property we should be very chary of touching 
anything that might conceivably be appropriated. If 
it was not the property of individuals it might be the 
property of the State. But beyond that we might have 
our doubts. Are we right in wearing the strange cos- 
tumes we do, in choosing the path that pleases us 
athwart this rock and turf, in coming striding with un- 
fumigated rucksacks and snow- wet hobnails into what is 
conceivably an extremely neat and orderly world ? We 
have passed our first Utopian now, with an answered 
vague gesture, and have noted, with secret satisfaction, 
there is no access of dismay ; we have rounded a bend, 
and down the valley in the distance we get a glimpse of 
what appears to be a singularly well-kept road. . . . 

I submit that to the modern minded man it can be 
no sort of Utopia worth desiring that does not give 
the utmost freedom of going to and fro. Free move- 
ment is to many people one of the greatest of life's 
privileges to go wherever the spirit moves them, to 
wander and see and though they have every comfort, 
every security, every virtuous discipline, they will still 
be unhappy if that is denied them. Short of damage 
to things cherished and made, the Utopians will surely 
have this right, so we may expect no unclimbable walls 
and fences, nor the discovery of any laws we may trans- 
gress in coming down these mountain places. 

And yet, just as civil liberty itself is a compromise 
defended by prohibitions, so this particular sort of 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 45 

liberty must also have its qualifications. Carried to 
the absolute pitch the right of free movement ceases 
to be distinguishable from the right of free intrusion. 
We have already, in a comment on More's Utopia, 
hinted at an agreement with Aristotle's argument, 
against communism, that it flings people into an in- 
tolerable continuity of contact. Schopenhauer carried 
out Aristotle in the vein of his own bitterness and with 
the truest of images when he likened human society to 
hedgehogs clustering for warmth, and unhappy when 
either too closely packed or too widely separated. 
Empedocles found no significance in life whatever 
k except as an unsteady play of love and hate, of attrac- 
tion and repulsion, of assimilation and the assertion of 
difference. So long as we ignore difference, so long as 
we ignore individuality, and that I hold has been the 
common sin of all Utopias hitherto, we can make abso- 
lute statements, prescribe communisms or individual- 
isms, and all sorts of hard theoretic arrangements. But 
in the world of reality, which to modernise Heraclitus 
and Empedocles is nothing more nor less than the 
world of individuality, there are no absolute rights and 
wrongs, there are no qualitative questions at all, but 
only quantitative adjustments. Equally strong in the \ 
normal civilised man is the desire for freedom of move- \ 
ment and the desire for a certain privacy, for a corner I 
definitely his, and we have to consider where the line of 
reconciliation comes. 

The desire for absolute personal privacy is perhaps 
never a very strong or persistent craving. In the great 



46 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

majority of human beings, the gregarious instinct is 
sufficiently powerful to render any but the most tem- 
porary isolations not simply disagreeable, but painful. 
The savage has all the privacy he needs within the 
compass of his skull ; like dogs anr[ timi^ wojnp.n- he 



prefers ill-treatment to desertion, and* it is only a scarce 
and complex modern type that finds comfort and re- 
freshment in quite lonely places and quite solitary occu- 
pations. Yet such there are, men who can neither sleep 
well nor think well, nor attain to a full perception of 
beautiful objects, who do not savour the best of exist- 
ence until they are securely alone, and for the sake 
of these even it would be reasonable to draw some 
limits to the general right of free movement. But their 
particular need is only a special and exceptional aspect 
of an almost universal claim to privacy among modern 
people, not so much for the sake of isolation as for 
congenial companionship. We want to go apart from 
^the great crowd, not so much to be alone as to be with 
Ithose who appeal to us particularly and to whom we 
{particularly appeal ; we want to form households and 
societies with them, to give our individualities play in 
intercourse with them, and in the appointments and 
furnishings of that intercourse. We want gardens and 
enclosures and exclusive freedoms for our like and our 
choice, just as spacious as we can get them and it is 
only the multitudinous uncongenial, anxious also for 
similar developments in some opposite direction, that 
checks this expansive movement of personal selection 
and necessitates a compromise on privacy. 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 47 

Glancing back from our Utopian mountain side down 
which this discourse marches, to the confusions of old 
earth, we may remark that the need and desire for 
privacies there is exceptionally great at the present 
time, that it was less in the past, that in the future 
it may be less again, and that under the Utopian con- 
ditions to which we shall come when presently we strike 
yonder road, it may be reduced to quite manageable 
dimensions. But this is to be effected not by the sup- 
pression of individualities to some common pattern,* 
but by the broadening of public charity and the general 
amelioration of mind and manners. It is not by assimi- 
lation, that is to say, but by understanding that the 
modern Utopia achieves itself. The ideal community 
of man's past was one with a common belief, with 
common customs and common ceremonies, common 
manners and common formulae ; men of the same 
society dressed in the same fashion, each according to 
his denned and understood grade, behaved in the same 
fashion, loved, worshipped, and died in the same fashion. 
They did or felt little that did not find a sympathetic 
publicity. The natural disposition of all peoples, white, 
black, or brown, a natural disposition that education 
seeks to destroy, is to insist upon uniformity, to make 
publicity extremely unsympathetic to even the most 
harmless departures from the code. To be .dressed 
" odd," to behave " oddly," to eat in a different manner 
or of different food, to commit, indeed, any breach of 

* More's Utopia. " Whoso will may go in, for there is nothing 
within the houses that is private or anie man's owne." 



48 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

the established convention is to give offence and to incur 
hostility among unsophisticated men. But the disposi- 
tion of the more original and enterprising minds at all 
times has been to make such innovations. 

Thi? is particularly in evidence in this present age. 
The almost cataclysmal development of new machinery, 
the discovery of new materials, and the appearance of 
new social possibilities through the organised pursuit of 
material science, has given enormous and unprecedented 
facilities to the spirit of innovation. The old local order 
has been broken up or is now being broken up all over 
the earth, and everywhere societies deliquesce, every- 
where men are afloat amidst the wreckage of their 
flooded conventions, and still tremendously unaware of 
the thing that has happened. The old local orthodoxies 
of behaviour, of precedence, the old accepted amuse- 
ments and employments, the old ritual of conduct in the 
important small things of the daily life and the old 
ritual of thought in the things that make discussion, 
are smashed up and scattered and mixed discordantly 
together, one use with another, and no world-wide 
culture of toleration, no courteous admission of differ- 
ences, no wider understanding has yet replaced them. 
And so publicity in the modern earth has become con- 
fusedly unsympathetic for everyone. Classes are in- 
tolerable to classes and sets to sets, contact provokes 
aggressions, comparisons, persecutions and discomforts, 
and the subtler people are excessively tormented by a 
sense of observation, unsympathetic always and often 
hostile. To live without some sort of segregation from 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 49 

the general mass is impossible in exact proportion to 
one's individual distinction. 

Of course things will be very different in Utopia. 
Utopia will be saturated with consideration. To us, clad 
as we are in mountain-soiled tweeds and with no money 
but British bank-notes negotiable only at a practically 
infinite distance, this must needs be a reassuring induc- 
tion. And Utopian manners will not only be tolerant, 
but almost universally tolerable. Endless things will 
be understood perfectly and universally that on earth 
are understood only by a scattered few ; baseness of 
bearing, grossness of manner, will be the distinctive mark 
of no section of the community whatever. The coarser 
reasons for privacy, therefore, will not exist here. And 
that savage sort of shyness, too, that makes so many 
half-educated people on earth recluse and defensive, that 
too the Utopians will have escaped by their more liberal 
breeding. In the cultivated State we are assuming it 
will be ever so much easier for people to eat in public, 
rest and amuse themselves in public, and even work in 
public. Our present need for privacy in many things 
marks, indeed, a phase of transition from an ease in 
public in the past due to homogeneity, to an ease in 
public in the future due to intelligence and good breed- 
ing, and in Utopia that transition will be complete. 
We must bear that in mind throughout the considera- 
tion of this question. 

Yet, after this allowance has been made, there still 
remains a considerable claim for privacy in Utopia. 
The room, or apartments, or home, or mansion, what- 



50 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

ever it may be a man or woman maintains, must be 
private, and under his or her complete dominion ; it 
seems harsh and intrusive to forbid a central garden 
plot or peristyle, such as one sees in Pompeii, within 
the house walls, and it is almost as difficult to deny a 
little private territory beyond the house. Yet if we 
concede that, it is clear that without some further pro- 
vision we concede the possibility that the poorer towns- 
man (if there are to be rich and poor in the world) will 
be forced to walk through endless miles of high fenced 
villa gardens before he may expand in his little scrap 
of reserved open country. Such is already the poor 
Londoner's miserable fate. . . . Our Utopia will have, 
of course, faultless roads and beautifully arranged inter- 
urban communications, swift trains or motor services 
or what not, to diffuse its population, and without some 
anticipatory provisions, the prospect of the residential 
areas becoming a vast area of defensively walled villa 
Edens is all too possible. 

This is a quantitative question, be it remembered, 
and not to be dismissed by any statement of principle. 
Our Utopians will meet it, I presume, by detailed regu- 
lations, very probably varying locally with local con- 
ditions. Privacy beyond the house might be made a 
privilege to be paid for in proportion to the area occu- 
pied, and the tax on these licences of privacy might 
increase as the square of the area affected. A maximum 
fraction of private enclosure for each urban and sub- 
urban square mile could be fixed. A distinction could 
be drawn between an absolutely private garden and a 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 51 

garden private and closed only for a day or a couple 
of days a week, and at other times open to the well- 
behaved public. Who, in a really civilised community, 
would grudge that measure of invasion ? Walls could 
be taxed by height and length, and the enclosure of 
really natural beauties, of rapids, cascades, gorges, 
viewpoints, and so forth made impossible. So a reason- 
able compromise between the vital and conflicting claims 
of the freedom of movement and the freedom of seclu- 
sion might be attained. . . . 

And as we argue thus we draw nearer and nearer 
to the road that goes up and over the Gotthard crest 
and down the Val Tremola towards Italy. 

What sort of road would that be ? 



3 

Freedom of movement in a Utopia planned under 
modern conditions must involve something more than 
unrestricted pedestrian wanderings, and the very pro- 
position of a world-state speaking one common tongue 
carries with it the idea of a world population travelled 
and travelling to an extent quite beyond anything our 
native earth has seen. It is now our terrestrial ex- 
perience that whenever economic and political develop- 
ments set a class free to travel, that class at once begins 
to travel ; in England, for example, above the five 
or six hundred pounds a year level, it is hard to find 



52 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

anyone who is not habitually migratory, who has not 
been frequently, as people say, " abroad." In the 
Modern Utopia travel must be in the common texture 
of life. To go into fresh climates and fresh scenery, 
to meet a different complexion of humanity and a 
different type of home and food and apparatus, to 
mark unfamiliar trees and plants and flowers and beasts, 
to climb mountains, to see the snowy night of the 
North and the blaze of the tropical midday, to follow 
great rivers, to taste loneliness in desert places, to 
traverse the gloom of tropical forests and to cross the 
high seas, will be an essential part of the reward and 
adventure of life, even for the commonest people. . . . 
This is a bright and pleasant particular in which a 
modern Utopia must differ again, and differ diametric- 
ally, from its predecessors. 

We may conclude from what has been done in places 
upon our earth that the whole Utopian world will be 
open and accessible and as safe for the wayfarer as 
France or England is to-day. The peace of the world 
will be established for ever, and everywhere, except in 
remote and desolate places, there will be convenient 
inns, at least as convenient and trustworthy as those 
of Switzerland to-day the touring clubs and hotel 
associations that have tariffed that country and France 
so effectually will have had their fine Utopian equiva- 
lents, and the whole world will be habituated to the 
coming and going of strangers. The greater part of 
the world will be as secure and cheaply and easily 
accessible to everyone as is Zermatt or Lucerne to a 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 53 

Western European of the middle-class at the present 
time. 

On this account alone no places will be so congested 
as these two are now on earth. With freedom to go 
everywhere, with easy access everywhere, with no dread 
of difficulties about language, coinage, custom, or law, 
why should everyone continue to go to just a few 
special places ? Such congestions are merely the 
measure of the general inaccessibility and insecurity 
and costliness of contemporary life, an awkward tran- 
sitory phase in the first beginnings of the travel age 
of mankind. 

No doubt the Utopian will travel in many ways. It 
is unlikely there will be any smoke-disgorging steam 
railway trains in Utopia, they are already doomed on 
earth, already threatened with that obsolescence that 
will endear them to the Ruskins of to-morrow, but a 
thin spider's web of inconspicuous special routes will 
cover the land of the world, pierce the mountain masses 
and tunnel under the seas. These may be double rail- 
ways or monorails or what not we are no engineers 
to judge between such devices but by means of them 
the Utopian will travel about the earth from one chief 
point to another at a speed of two or three hundred 
miles or more an hour. That will abolish the greater 
distances. . . . One figures these main communications 
as something after the manner of corridor trains, smooth- 
running and roomy, open from end to end, with cars 
in which one may sit and read, cars in which one may 
take refreshment, cars into which the news of the day 



54 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

comes printing itself from the wires beside the track ; 
cars in which one may have privacy and sleep if one is 
so disposed, bath-room cars, library cars ; a train as 
comfortable as a good club. There will be no distinc- 
tions of class in such a train, because in a civilised 
world there would be no offence between one kind 
of man and another, and for the good of the whole 
world such travelling will be as cheap as it can be, 
and well within the reach of any but the almost crimi- 
nally poor. 

Such great tramways as this will be ussd when the 
Utopians wish to travel fast and far thereby you will 
glide all over the land surface of the planet ; and feed- 
ing them and distributing from them, innumerable 
minor systems, clean little electric tramways I picture 
them, will spread out over the land in finer reticula- 
tions, growing close and dense in the urban regions 
and thinning as the population thins. And running 
beside these lighter railways, and spreading beyond 
their range, will be the smooth minor high roads such 
as this one we now approach, upon which independent 
vehicles, motor cars, cycles, and what not, will go. I 
doubt if we shall see any horses upon this fine, smooth, 
clean road ; I doubt if there will be many horses on 
the high roads of Utopia, and, indeed, if they will use 
draught horses at all upon that planet. Why should 
they ? Where the world gives turf or sand, or along 
special tracts, the horse will perhaps be ridden for 
exercise and pleasure, but that will be all the use for 
him : and as for the other beasts of burthen, on the 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 55 

remoter mountain tracks the mule will no doubt still 
be a picturesque survival, in the desert men will still 
find a use for the camel, and the elephant may linger 
to play a part in the pageant of the East. But the 
burthen of the minor traffic, if not the whole of it, 
will certainly be mechanical. This is what we shall 
see even while the road is still remote, swift and shapely 
motor-cars going past, cyclists, and in these agreeable 
mountain regions there will also be pedestrians upon 
their way. Cycle tracks will abound in Utopia, some- 
times following beside the great high roads, but oftener 
taking their own more agreeable line amidst woods and 
crops and pastures ; and there will be a rich variety 
of footpaths and minor ways. There will be many 
footpaths in Utopia. There will be pleasant ways over 
the scented needles of the mountain pinewoods, primrose- 
strewn tracks amidst the budding thickets of the lower 
country, paths running beside rushing streams, paths 
across the wide spaces of the corn land, and, above all, 
paths through the flowery garden spaces amidst which 
the houses in the towns will stand. And everywhere 
about the world, on road and path, by sea and land, 
the happy holiday Utopians will go. 

The population of Utopia will be a migratory popula- 
tion beyond any earthly precedent, not simply a travel- 
ling population, but migratory. The old Utopias were 
all localised, as localised as a parish councillor ; but 
it is manifest that nowadays even quite ordinary people 
live over areas that would have made a kingdom in 
those former days, would have filled the Athenian of 



56 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

the Laws with incredulous astonishment. Except for 
the habits of the very rich during the Roman Empire, 
there was never the slightest precedent for this modern 
detachment from place. It is nothing to us that we 
go eighty or ninety miles from home to place of busi- 
ness, or take an hour's spin of fifty miles to our week-end 
golf ; every summer it has become a fixed custom to 
travel wide and far. Only the clumsiness of com- 
munications limit* us now, and every facilitation of 
locomotion widens not only our potential, but our 
habitual range. Not only this, but we change our 
habitations with a growing frequency and facility ; to 
Sir Thomas More we should seem a breed of nomads. 
That old fixity was of necessity and not of choice, it 
was a mere phase in the development of civilisation, a 
trick of rooting man learnt for a time from his new- 
found friends, the corn and the vine and the hearth ; 
the untamed spirit of the young has turned for ever to 
wandering and the sea. The soul of man has never 
yet in any land been willingly adscript to the glebe. 
Even Mr. Belloc, who preaches the happiness of a 
peasant proprietary, is so much wiser than his thoughts 
that he sails about the seas in a little yacht or goes 
afoot from Belgium to Rome. We are winning our 
freedom again once more, a freedom renewed and 
enlarged, and there is now neither necessity nor advan- 
tage in a permanent life servitude to this place or that. 
Men may settle down in our Modern Utopia for love 
and the family at last, but first and most abundantly 
they will see the world. 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 57 

And with this loosening of the fetters of locality 
from the feet of men, necessarily there will be all sorts 
of fresh distributions of the factors of life. On our 
own poor haphazard earth, wherever men work, wherever 
there are things to be grown, minerals to be won, power 
to be used, there, regardless of all the joys and decencies 
of life, the households needs must cluster. But in 
Utopia there will be wide stretches of cheerless or un- 
healthy or toilsome or dangerous land with never a 
household ; there will be regions of mining and smelting, 
black with the smoke of furnaces and gashed and deso- 
lated by mines, with a sort of weird inhospitable grandeur 
of industrial desolation, and the men will come thither and 
work for a spell and return to civilisation again, washing 
and changing their attire in the swift gliding train. 
And by way of compensation there will be beautiful 
regions of the earth specially set apart and favoured 
for children in them the presence of children will 
remit taxation, while in other less wholesome places the 
presence of children will be taxed ; the lower passes 
and fore hills of these very Alps, for example, will be 
populous with homes, serving the vast arable levels of 
Upper Italy. 

So we shall see, as we come down by our little lake 
in the lap of Lucendro, and even before we reach the 
road, the first scattered chalets and households in 
which these migrant people live, the upper summer 
homes. With the coming of summer, as the snows on 
the high Alps recede, a tide of households and schools, 
teachers and doctors, and all such attendant services 



58 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

will flow up the mountain masses, and ebb again when 
the September snows return. It is essential to the 
modern ideal of life that the period of education and 
growth should be prolonged to as late a period as 
possible and puberty correspondingly retarded, and by 
wise regulation the statesmen of Utopia will constantly 
adjust and readjust regulations and taxation to diminish 
the proportion of children reared in hot and stimulating 
conditions. These high mountains will, in the bright 
sweet summer, be populous with youth. Even up to- 
wards this high place where the snow is scarce gone until 
July, these households will extend, and below, the whole 
long valley of Urseren will be a scattered summer town. 

One figures one of the more urban highways, one 
of those along which the light railways of the second 
order run, such as that in the valley of Urseren, into 
which we should presently come. I figure it as one 
would see it at night, a band a hundred yards perhaps 
in width, the footpath on either side shaded with high 
trees and lit softly with orange glowlights ; while down 
the centre the tramway of the road will go, with some- 
times a nocturnal tram-car gliding, lit and gay but 
almost noiselessly, past. Lantern-lit cyclists will flit 
along the track like fireflies, and ever and again some 
humming motor-car will hurry by, to or from the 
Rhoneland or the Rhineland or Switzerland or Italy. 
Away on either side the lights of the little country 
homes up the mountain slopes will glow. 

I figure it at night, because so it is we should see 
it first. 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 59 

We should come out from our mountain valley into 
the minor road that runs down the lonely rock wilder- 
ness of the San Gotthard Pass, we should descend that 
nine miles of winding route, and so arrive towards 
twilight among the clustering homes and upland un- 
enclosed gardens of Realp and Hospenthal and Ander- 
matt. Between Realp and Andermatt, and down the 
Schoellenen gorge, the greater road would run. By 
the time we reached it, we should be in the way of 
understanding our adventure a little better. We 
should know already, when we saw those two familiar 
clusters of chalets and hotels replaced by a great dis- 
persed multitude of houses we should see their window 
lights, but little else that we were the victims of some 
strange transition in space or time, and we should 
come down by dimly-seen buildings into the part that 
would answer to Hospenthal, wondering and perhaps 
a little afraid. We should come out into this great 
main roadway this roadway like an urban avenue 
and look up it and down, hesitating whether to go 
along the valley Furka-ward, or down by Andermatt 
through the gorge that leads to Goschenen. . . . 

People would pass us in the twilight, and then more 
people ; we should see they walked well and wore a 
graceful, unfamiliar dress, but more we should not 
distinguish. 

" Good-night ! " they would say to us in clear, fine 
voices. Their dim faces would turn with a passing 
scrutiny towards us. 

We should answer out of our perplexity : " Good- 



60 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

night ! " for by the conventions established in the 
beginning of this book, we are given the freedom of 
their tongue. 



4 

Were this a story, I should tell at length how much 
we were helped by the good fortune of picking up a 
Utopian coin of gold, how at last we adventured into 
the Utopian inn and found it all marvellously easy. 
You see us the shyest and most watchful of guests ; 
but of the food they put before us and the furnishings 
of the house, and all our entertainment, it will be 
better to speak later. We are in a migratory world, 
we know, one greatly accustomed to foreigners ; our 
mountain clothes are not strange enough to attract 
acute attention, though ill-made and shabby, no doubt, 
by Utopian standards ; we are dealt with as we might 
best wish to be dealt with, that is to say as rather 
untidy, inconspicuous men. We look about us and 
watch for hints and examples, and, indeed, get through 
with the thing. And after our queer, yet not un- 
pleasant, dinner, in which we remark no meat figures, 
we go out of the house for a breath of air and for quiet 
counsel one with another, and there it is we discover 
those strange constellations overhead. It comes to us 
then, clear and full, that our imagination has realised 
itself ; we dismiss quite finally a Rip- Van-Winkle fancy 
we have entertained, all the unfamiliarities of our 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 61 

descent from the mountain pass gather together into 
one fullness of conviction, and we know, we know, we 
are in Utopia. 

We wander under the trees by the main road, watch- 
ing the dim passers-by as though they were the phan- 
toms of a dream. We say little to one another. We 
turn aside into a little pathway and come to a bridge 
over the turbulent Reuss, hurrying down towards the 
Devil's Bridge in the gorge below. Far away over the 
Furka ridge a pallid glow preludes the rising of the 
moon. 

Two lovers pass us whispering, and we follow them 
with our eyes. This Utopia has certainly preserved 
the fundamental freedom, to love. And then a sweet- 
voiced bell from somewhere high up towards Oberalp 
chimes two-and-twenty times. 

I break the silence. " That might mean ten o'clock/' 
[ say. 

My companion leans upon the bridge and looks down 
into the dim river below. I become aware of the keen 
edge of the moon like a needle of incandescent silver 
creeping over the crest, and suddenly the river is alive 
with flashes. 

He speaks, and astonishes me with the hidden course 
his thoughts have taken. 

" We two were boy and girl lovers like that," he 
5ays, and jerks a head at the receding Utopians. " I 
loved her first, and I do not think I have ever thought 
of loving anyone but her." 

It is a curiously human thing, and, upon my honour, 



62 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

not one I had designed, that when at last I stand in 
the twilight in the midst of a Utopian township, when 
my whole being should be taken up with speculative 
wonder, this man should be standing by my side, and 
lugging my attention persistently towards himself, to- 
wards his limited futile self. This thing perpetually 
happens to me, this intrusion of something small and 
irrelevant and alive, upon my great impressions. The 
time I first saw the Matterhorn, that Queen among the 
Alpine summits, I was distracted beyond appreciation 
by the tale of a man who could not eat sardines 
always sardines did this with him and that ; and my 
first wanderings along the brown streets of Pompeii, 
an experience I had anticipated with a strange intensity, 
was shot with the most stupidly intelligent discourse on 
vehicular tariffs in the chief capitals of Europe that it 
is possible to imagine. And now this man, on my first 
night in Utopia, talks and talks and talks of his poor 
little love affair. 

It shapes itself as the most trite and feeble of trag- 
edies, one of those stories of effortless submission to 
chance and custom in which Mr. Hardy or George 
Gissing might have found a theme. I do but half 
listen at first watching the black figures in the moon- 
lit roadway pacing to and fro. Yet I cannot trace 
how he conveys the subtle conviction to my mind the 
woman he loves is beautiful. 

They were boy and girl together, and afterwards 
they met again as fellow students in a world of com- 
fortable discretions. He seems to have taken the 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 63 

decorums of life with a confiding good faith, to have 
been shy and innocent in a suppressed sort of way, 
and of a mental type not made for worldly successes ; 
bnt he must have dreamt about her and loved her well 
enough. How she felt for him I could never gather ; 
it seemed to be all of that fleshless friendliness into 
which we train our girls. Then abruptly happened 
stresses. The man who became her husband appeared, 
with a very evident passion. He was a year or so 
older than either of them, and he had the habit and 
quality of achieving his ends ; he was already success- 
ful, and with the promise of wealth, and I, at least, 
perceived, from my botanist's phrasing, that his desire 
was for her beauty. 

As my botanist talked I seemed to see the whole 
little drama, rather clearer than his words gave it me, 
the actors all absurdly in Hampstead middle-class 
raiment, meetings of a Sunday after church (the men 
in silk hats, frock coats, and tightly-rolled umbrellas), 
rare excursions into evening dress, the decorously 
vulgar fiction read in their homes, its ambling senti- 
mentalities of thought, the amiably worldly mothers, 
the respectable fathers, the aunts, the " people " his 
" people " and her " people " the piano music and 
the song, and in this setting our friend, " quite clever " 
at botany and " going in " for it "as a profession," 
and the girl, gratuitously beautiful ; so I figured the 
arranged and orderly environment into which this claw 
of an elemental force had thrust itself to grip. 

The stranger who had come in got what he wanted 



64 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

the girl considered that she thought she had never 
loved the botanist, had had only friendship for him 
though little she knew of the meaning of those fine 
words they parted a little incoherently and in tears, 
and it had not occurred to the young man to imagine 
she was not going off to conventional life in some other 
of the endless Frognals he imagined as the cellular 
tissue of the world. 

But she wasn't. 

He had kept her photograph and her memory sweet, 
and if ever he had strayed from the severest constancy, 
it seemed only in the end to strengthen with the stuff 
of experience, to enhance by comparative disappoint- 
ment his imagination of what she might have meant to 
him. . . . Then eight years afterwards they met again. 

By the time he gets to this part of his story we have, 
at my initiative, left the bridge and are walking towards 
the Utopian guest house. The Utopian guest house ! 
His voice rises and falls, and sometimes he holds my 
arm. My attention comes and goes. " Good-night," 
two sweet-voiced Utopians cry to us in their universal 
tongue, and I answer them " Good-night." 

"You see," he persists, "I saw her only a" week 
ago. It was in Lucerne, while I was waiting for you 
to come on from England. I talked to her three, or 
four times altogether. And her face the change in 
her ! I can't get it out of my head night or day. 
The miserable waste of her. ..." 

Before us, through the tall pine stems, shine the 
lights of our Utopian inn. 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 65 

He talks vaguely of ill-usage. " The husband is 
vain, boastful, dishonest to the very confines of the 
law, and a drunkard. There are scenes and insults " 

" She told you ? " 

" Not much, but someone else did. He brings other 
women almost into her presence to spite her." 

" And it's going on ? " I interrupt. 

" Yes. Now." 

" Need it go on ? " 

" What do you mean ? " 

" Lady in trouble," I say. " Knight at hand. Why 
not stop this dismal grizzling and carry her off ? " 
(You figure the heroic sweep of the arm that belongs to 
the Voice.} I positively forget for the moment that we 
are in Utopia at all. 

" You mean ?'" 

" Take her away from him ! What's all this emotion 
of yours worth if it isn't equal to that ! " 

Positively he seems aghast at me. 

" Do you mean elope with her ? " 

" It seems a most suitable case." 

For a space he is silent, and we go on through the 
trees. A Utopian tram-car passes and I see his face, 
poor bitted wretch ! looking pinched and scared in its 
trailing glow of light. 

" That's all very well in a novel," he says. " But 
how could I go back to my laboratory, mixed classes 
with young ladies, you know, after a thing like that ? 
How could we live and where could we live ? We 
might have a house in London, but who would call 

3 



66 ^ A MODERN UTOPIA. 

upon us ? ... Besides, you don't know her. She is 
not the sort of woman. . . . Don't think I'm timid or 
conventional. Don't think I don't feel. . . . Feel ! 
You don't know what it is to feel in a .case of this 
sort. . . ." 

He halts and then flies out viciously: " Ugh! There 
are times when I could strangle him with my hands." 

Which is nonsense. 

He flings out his lean botanising hands in an im- 
potent gesture. 

" My dear Man ! " I say, and say no more. 

For a moment I forget we are in Utopia altogether. 



5 

Let us come back to Utopia. We were speaking 
of travel. 

Besides roadways and railways and tramways, for 
those who go to and fro in the earth the Modern Utopians 
will have very many other ways of travelling. There 
will be rivers, for example, with a vast variety of boats ; 
canals with diverse sorts of haulage ; there will be 
lakes and lagoons ; and when one comes at last to the 
borders of the land, the pleasure craft will be there, 
coming and going, and the swift great passenger vessels, 
very big and steady, doing thirty knots an hour or 
more, will trace long wakes as they go dwindling out 
athwart the restless vastness of the sea. 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 67 

They will be just beginning to fly in Utopia. We 
owe much to M. Santos Dumont ; the world is im- 
measurably more disposed to believe this wonder is 
coming, and coming nearly, than it was five years ago. 
But unless we are to suppose Utopian scientific know- 
ledge far in advance of ours and though that supposi- 
tion was not proscribed in our initial undertaking, it 
would be inconvenient for us and not quite in the vein 
of the rest of our premises they, too, will only be in 
the same experimental stage as ourselves. In Utopia, 
however, they will conduct research by the army corps 
while we conduct it we don't conduct it ! We let it 
happen. Fools make researches and wise men exploit 
them that is our earthly way of dealing with the 
question, and we thank Heaven for an assumed abund- 
ance of financially impotent and sufficiently ingenious 
fools. 

In Utopia, a great multitude of selected men, chosen 
volunteers, will be collaborating upon this new step in 
man's struggle with the elements. Bacon's visionary 
House of Saloman * will be a thing realised, and it will 
be humming with this business. Every university in 
the world will be urgently working for priority in this 
aspect of the problem or that. Reports of experiments, 
as full and as prompt as the telegraphic reports of 
cricket in our more sportive atmosphere, will go about 
the world. All this will be passing, as it were, behind 
the act drop of our first experience, behind this first 
picture of the urbanised Urseren valley. The literature 

* In The New Atlantis. 



68 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

of the subject will be growing and developing with the 
easy swiftness of an eagle's swoop as we come down the 
hillside ; unseen in that twilight, unthought of by us 
until this moment, a thousand men at a thousand glow- 
ing desks, a busy specialist press, will be perpetually 
sifting, criticising, condensing, and clearing the ground 
for further speculation. Those who are concerned with 
the problems of public locomotion will be following 
these aeronautic investigations with a keen and enter- 
prising interest, and so will the physiologist and the 
sociologist. That Utopian research will, I say, go like 
an eagle's swoop in comparison with the blind-man's 
fumbling of our terrestrial way. Even before our own 
brief Utopian journey is out, we may get a glimpse of 
the swift ripening of all this activity that will be in 
progress at our coming. To-morrow, perhaps, or in a 
day or so, some silent, distant thing will come gliding 
into view over the mountains, will turn and soar and 
pass again beyond our astonished sight. . . . 



6 

But my friend and his great trouble turn my mind 
from these questions of locomotion and the freedoms 
that cluster about them. In spite of myself I find 
myself framing his case. He is a lover, the most con- 
ventional of Anglican lovers, with a heart that has 
had its training, I should think, in the clean but limited 
schoolroom of Mrs. Henry Wood. . . . 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 69 

In Utopia I think they will fly with stronger pinions, 
it will not be in the superficialities of life merely that 
movement will be wide and free, they will mount higher 
and swoop more steeply than he in his cage can believe. 
What will their range be, their prohibitions ? what jars 
to our preconceptions will he and I receive here ? 

My mind flows with the free, thin flow that it has 
at the end of an eventful day, and as we walk along in 
silence towards our inn I rove from issue to issue, I 
find myself ranging amidst the fundamental things of 
the individual life and all the perplexity of desires and 
passions. I turn my questionings to the most difficult 
of all sets of compromises, those mitigations of spon- 
taneous freedom that constitute the marriage laws, 
the mystery of balancing justice against the good of 
the future, amidst these violent and elusive passions. 
Where falls the balance of freedoms here ? I pass for a 
time from Utopianising altogether, to ask the question 
that, after all, Schopenhauer failed completely to 
answer, why sometimes in the case of hurtful, pointless, 
and destructive things we want so vehemently. . . . 

I come back from this unavailing glance into the 
deeps to the general question of freedoms in this new 
relation. I find myself far adrift from the case of the 
Frognal botanist, and asking how far a modern Utopia 
will deal with personal morals. 

As Plato demonstrated long ago, the principles of 
the relation of State control to personal morals may be 
best discussed in the case of intoxication, the most 
isolated and least complicated of all this group of 



;o A MODERN UTOPIA. 

problems. But Plato's treatment of this issue as a 
question of who may or may not have the use of wine, 
though suitable enough in considering a small State in 
which everybody was the effectual inspector of every- 
body, is entirely beside the mark under modern con- 
ditions, in which we are to have an extraordinarily 
higher standard of individual privacy and an ampli- 
tude and quantity of migration inconceivable to the 
Academic imagination. We may accept his principle 
and put this particular freedom (of the use of wine) 
among the distinctive privileges of maturity, and still 
find all that a modern would think of as the Drink 
Question untouched. 

That question in Utopia will differ perhaps in the 
proportion of its factors, but in no other respect, from 
what it is upon earth. The same desirable ends will 
be sought, the maintenance of public order and decency, 
the reduction of inducements to form this bad and 
wasteful habit to their lowest possible minimum, and 
the complete protection of the immature. But the 
modern Utopians, having systematised their sociology, 
will have given some attention to the psychology of 
minor officials, a matter altogether too much neglected 
by the social reformer on earth. They will not put 
into the hands of a common policeman powers direct 
and indirect that would be dangerous to the public in 
the hands of a judge. And they will have avoided the 
immeasurable error of making their control of the 
drink traffic a source of public revenue. Privacies 
they will not invade, but they will certainly restrict the 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 71 

public consumption of intoxicants to specified licensed 
places and the sale of them to unmistakable adults, 
and they will make the temptation of the young a 
grave offence. In so migratory a population as the 
Modern Utopian, the licensing of inns and bars would 
be under the same control as the railways and high 
roads. Inns exist for the stranger and not for the 
locality, and we shall meet with nothing there to corre- 
spond with our terrestrial absurdity of Local Option. 

The Utopians will certainly control this trade, and 
as certainly punish personal excesses. Public drunken- 
ness (as distinguished from the mere elation that 
follows a generous but controlled use of wine) will be 
an offence against public decency, and will be dealt 
with in some very drastic manner. It will, of course, 
be an aggravation of, and not an excuse for, crime. 

But I doubt whether the State will go beyond that. 
Whether an adult shall use wine or beer or spirits, or 
not, seems to me entirely a matter for his doctor and 
his own private conscience. I doubt if we explorers 
shall meet any drunken men, and I doubt not we shall 
meet many who have never availed themselves of their 
adult freedom in this respect. The conditions of 
physical happiness will be better understood in Utopia, 
it will be worth while to be well there, and the intelli- 
gent citizen will watch himself closely. Half and 
more of the drunkenness of earth is an attempt to 
lighten dull days and hopelessly sordid and disagree- 
able lives, and in Utopia they do not suffer these things. 
Assuredly Utopia will be temperate, not only drink- 



72 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

ing, but eating with the soundest discretion. Yet I 
do not think wine and good ale will be altogether want- 
ing there, nor good, mellow whisky, nor, upon occasion, 
the engaging various liqueur. I do not think so. My 
botanist, who abstains altogether, is of another opinion. 
We differ here and leave the question to the earnest 
reader. I have the utmost respect for all Teetotalers, 
Prohibitionists, and Haters and Persecutors of Inn- 
keepers, their energy of reform awakens responsive 
notes in me, and to their species I look for a large part 

of the urgent repair of our earth ; yet for all that 

There is Burgundy, for example, a bottle of soft 
and kindly Burgundy, taken to make a sunshine on 
one's lunch when four strenuous hours of toil have left 
one on the further side of appetite. Or ale, a foaming 
tankard of ale, ten miles of sturdy tramping in the 
sleet and slush as a prelude, and then good bread and 
good butter and a ripe hollow Stilton and celery and 
ale ale with a certain quantitative freedom. Or, 
again, where is the sin in a glass of tawny port three 
or four times, or it may be five, a year, when the wal- 
nuts come round in their season ? If you drink no 
port, then what are walnuts for ? Such things I hold 
for the reward of vast intervals of abstinence ; they 
justify your wide, immaculate margin, which is else a 
mere unmeaning blankness on the page of palate God 
has given you 1 I write of these things as a fleshly 
man, confessedly and knowingly fleshly, and more than 
usually aware of my liability to err I know myself for 
a gross creature more given to sedentary world-mending 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 73 

than to brisk activities, and not one-tenth as active as 
the dullest newspaper boy in London. Yet still I have 
my uses, uses that vanish in monotony, and still I must 
ask why should we bury the talent of these bright 
sensations altogether ? Under no circumstances can 
I think of my Utopians maintaining their fine order of 
life on ginger ale and lemonade and the ale that is 
Kops'. Those terrible Temperance Drinks, solutions of 
qualified sugar mixed with vast volumes of gas, as, for 
example, soda, seltzer, lemonade, and fire-extincteurs 
hand grenades minerals, they call such stuff in England 
fill a man with wind and self-righteousness. Indeed t 
they do ! Coffee destroys brain and kidney, a fact 
now universally recognised and advertised throughout 
America ; and tea, except for a kind of green tea best 
used with discretion in punch, tans the entrails and 
turns honest stomachs into leather bags. Rather would 
I be Metchnikoffed * at once and have a clean, good 
stomach of German silver. No ! If we are to have no 
ale in Utopia, give me the one clean temperance drink 
that is worthy to set beside wine, and that is simple 
water. Best it is when not quite pure and with a trace 
of organic matter, for then it tastes and sparkles. . . . 

My botanist would still argue. 

Thank Heaven this is my book, and that the ultimate 
decision rests with me. It is open to him to write his 
own Utopia and arrange that everybody shall do nothing 
except by the consent of the savants of the Republic, 
either in his eating, drinking, dressing or lodging, even 

* See The Nature of Man, by Professor Elie Metchnikofr. 



74 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

as Cabet proposed. It is open to him to try a News 
from Nowhere Utopia with the wine left out. I have 
my short way with him here quite effectually. I turn 
in the entrance of our inn to the civil but by no means 
obsequious landlord, and with a careful ambiguity of 
manner for the thing may be considered an outrage, 
and I try to make it possible the idea is a jest put 
my test demand. . . . 

" You see, my dear Teetotaler ? he sets before me 
tray and glass and ..." Here follows the necessary 
experiment and a deep sigh. ... " Yes, a bottle of 
quite excellent light beer ! So there are also cakes and 
ale in Utopia ! Let us in this saner and more beautiful 
world drink perdition to all earthly excesses. Let us 
drink more particularly to the coming of the day when 
men beyond there will learn to distinguish between 
qualitative and quantitative questions, to temper good 
intentions with good intelligence, and righteousness 
with wisdom. One of the darkest evils of our world is 
surely the unteachable wildness of the Good." 



7 

So presently to bed and to sleep, but not at once to 
sleep. At first my brain, like a dog in unfamiliar 
quarters, must turn itself round for a time or so before 
it lies down. This strange mystery of a world of which 
I have seen so little as yet a mountain slope, a twilit 



CONCERNING FREEDOMS. 75 

road, a traffic of ambiguous vehicles and dim shapes, 
the window lights of many homes fills me with curi- 
osities. Figures and incidents come and go, the people 
we have passed, our landlord, quietly attentive and yet, 
I feel, with the keenest curiosity peeping from his 
eyes, the unfamiliar forms of the house parts and fur- 
nishings, the unfamiliar courses of the meal. Outside 
this little bedroom is a world, a whole unimagined world. 
A thousand million things lie outside in the darkness 
beyond th?s lit inn of ours, unthought-of possibilities, 
overlooked considerations, surprises, riddles, incom- 
mensurables, a whole monstrous intricate universe of 
consequences that I have to do my best to unravel. 
I attempt impossible recapitulations and mingle the 
weird quality of dream stuff with my thoughts. 

Athwart all this tumult of my memory goes this 
queer figure of my unanticipated companion, so ob- 
sessed by himself and his own egotistical love that this 
sudden change to another world seems only a change 
of scene for his gnawing, uninvigorating passion. It 
occurs to me that she also must have an equivalent in 
Utopia, and then that idea and all ideas grow thin and 
vague, and are dissolved at last in the rising tide of 
sleep. . . . 



CHAPTER THE THIRD 

UTOPIAN ECONOMICS 
I 

THESE modern Utopians with the universally diffused 
good manners, the universal education, the fine 
freedoms we shall ascribe to them, their world unity, 
world language, world-wide travellings, world-wide free- 
dom of sale and purchase, will remain mere dreamstuff, 
incredible even by twilight, until we have shown that 
at that level the community will still sustain itself. 
At any rate, the common liberty of the Utopians will 
not embrace the common liberty to be unserviceable, 
the most perfect economy of organisation still leaves 
the fact untouched that all order and security in a State 
rests on the certainty of getting work done ? How will 
the work of this planet be done ? What will be the 
i^conomics of a modern Utopia ? 

Now in the first place, a state so vast and complex 
as this world Utopia, and with so migratory a people, 
will need some handy symbol to check the distribution 
of services and commodities. Almost certainly they 
will need to have money. They will have money, and 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 77 

it is not inconceivable that, for all his sorrowful thoughts, 
our botanist, with his trained observation, his habit 
of looking at little things upon the ground, would be 
the one to see and pick up the coin that has fallen from 
some wayfarer's pocket. (This, in our first hour or so 
before we reach the inn in the Urseren Thai.) You 
figure us upon the high Gotthard road, heads together 
over the little disk that contrives to tell us so much 
of this strange world. 

It is, I imagine, of gold, and it will be a convenient 
accident if it is sufficient to make us solvent for a day 
or so, until we are a little more informed of the economic 
system into which we have 'come. It is, moreover, of a 
fair round size, and the inscription declares it one Lion, 
equal to " twaindy " bronze Crosses. Unless the ratio 
of metals is very different here, this latter must be a 
token coin, and therefore legal tender for but a small 
amount. (That would be pain and pleasure to Mr. 
Wordsworth Donisthorpe if he were to chance to join 
us, for once he planned a Utopian coinage,* and the 
words Lion and Cross are his. But a token coinage and 
" legal tender " he cannot abide. They make him argue.) 
And being in Utopia, that unfamiliar " twaindy " sug- 
gests at once we have come upon that most Utopian 
oi all things, a duodecimal system of counting. 

My author's privilege of details serves me here. This 

Lion is distinctly a beautiful coin, admirably made, 

with its value in fine, clear letters circling the obverse 

side, and a head thereon of Newton, as I live ! One 

* A System of Measures, by Wordsworth Donisthorpe. 



7 8 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

detects American influence here. Each year, as we shall 
find, each denomination of coins celebrates a centenary. 
The reverse shows the universal goddess of the Utopian 
coinage Peace, as a beautiful woman, reading with a 
child out of a great book, and behind them are stars, 
and an hour-glass, halfway run. Very human these 
Utopians, after all, and not by any means above the 
obvious in their symbolism ! 

So for the first time we learn definitely of the World 
State, and we get our first clear hint, too, that there is 
an end to Kings. , But our coin raises other issues also. 
It would seem that this Utopia has no simple community 
of goods, that there is, at any rate, a restriction upon 
what one may take, a need for evidences of equivalent 
value, a limitation to human credit. 

It dates so much of this present Utopia of ours 
dates. Those former Utopists were bitterly against gold. 
You will recall the undignified use Sir Thomas More 
would have us put it to, and how there was no money 
at all in the Republic of Plato, and in that later com- 
munity for which he wrote his Laws an iron coinage of 
austere appearance and doubtful efficacy. ... It may 
be these great gentlemen were a little hasty with a 
complicated difficulty, and not a little unjust to a highly 
respectable element. 

Gold is abused and made into vessels of dishonour, 
and abolished from ideal society as though it were the 
cause instead of the instrument of human baseness ; 
but, indeed, there is nothing bad in gold. Making gold 
into vessels of dishonour and banishing it from the 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 



79 



. 



State is punishing the hatchet for the murderer's crime. 
Money, did you but use it right, is a good thing in life, 
a necessary thing in civilised human life, as complicated, 
indeed, for its purposes, but as natural a growth as 
the bones in a man's wrist, and I do not see how one 
can imagine anything at all worthy of being called a 
civilisation without it. It is the water of the body social, 
it distributes and receives, and renders growth and 
assimilation and movement and recovery possible. It 
is the reconciliation of human interdependence with 
liberty. What other device will give a man so great a 
freedom with so strong an inducement to effort ? The 
economic history of the world, where it is not the history 

. 

of the theory of property, is very largely the record of 
the abuse, not so much o? money as of credit devices 
to supplement money, to amplify the scope of this most 
precious invention ; and no device of labour credits * 
or free demand of commodities from a central store f 
or the like has ever been suggested that does not give 
ten thousand times more scope for that inherent moral 
dross in man that must be reckoned with in any sane 
Utopia we may design and plan. . . . Heaven knows 
where progress may not end, but at any rate this devel- 
oping State, into which we two men have fallen, this 
Twentieth Century Utopia, has still not passed beyond 
money and the use of coins. 

* Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, Ch. IX. 
t Mote's Utopia and Cabet's Icaria. 



80 A MODERN UTOPIA. 



2 

Now if this Utopian world is to be in some degree 
parallel to contemporary thought, it must have been 
concerned, it may be still concerned, with many un- 
settled problems of currency, and with the problems that 
centre about a standard of value. Gold is perhaps of all 
material substances the best adapted to the monetary 
purpose, but even at that best it falls far short of an 
imaginable ideal. It undergoes spasmodic and irregular 
cheapening through new discoveries of gold, and at any 
time it may undergo very extensive and sudden and 
disastrous depreciation through the discovery of some 
way of transmuting less valuable elements. The liability 
to such depreciations introduces an undesirable speculative 
element into the relations of debtor and creditor. When, 
on the one hand, there is for a time a check in the in- 
crease of the available stores of gold, or an increase in 
the energy applied to social purposes, or a checking of 
the public security that would impede the free exchange 
of credit and necessitate a more frequent production of 
gold in evidence, then there comes an undue apprecia- 
tion of money as against the general commodities of 
life, and an automatic impoverishment of the citizens 
in general as against the creditor class. The common 
people are mortgaged into the bondage of debt. And 
on the other hand an unexpected spate of gold pro- 
duction, the discovery of a single nugget as big as St. 
Paul's, let us say a quite possible thing would result 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 81 

in a sort of jail delivery of debtors and a financial 
earthquake. 

It has been suggested by an ingenious thinker that 
ii is possible to use as a standard of monetary value no 
substance whatever, but instead, force, and that value 
might be measured in units of energy. An excellent 
development this, in theory, at any rate, of the general 
idea of the modern State as kinetic and not static ; it 
throws the old idea of the social order and the new 
into the sharpest antithesis. The old order is presented 
as a system of institutions and classes ruled by men of 
substance ; the new, of enterprises and interests led by 
men of power. 

Now I glance at this matter in the most incidental 
manner, as a man may skim through a specialist's 
exposition in a popular magazine. You must figure 
me, therefore, finding from a casual periodical paper in 
our inn, with a certain surprise at not having anticipated 
as much, the Utopian self of that same ingenious person 
quite conspicuously a leader of thought, and engaged 
in organising the discussion of the currency changes 
Utopia has under consideration. The article, as it pre- 
sents itself to me, contains a complete and lucid, though 
occasionally rather technical, explanation of his newest 
proposals. They have been published, it seems, for 
general criticism, and one gathers that in the modern 
Utopia the administration presents the most elabor- 
ately detailed schemes of any proposed alteration in law 
or custom, some time before any measure is taken to 
carry it into effect, and the possibilities of every detail 



82 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

are acutely criticised, flaws anticipated, side issues 
raised, and the whole minutely tested and fined down 
by a planetful of critics, before the actual process of 
legislation begins. 

The explanation of these proposals involves an antici- 
patory glance at the local administration of a Modern 
Utopia. To anyone who has watched the development 
of technical science during the last decade or so, there 
will be no shock in the idea that a general consolidation 
of a great number of common public services over areas 
of considerable size is now not only practicable, but very 
desirable. In a little while heating and lighting and 
the supply of power for domestic and industrial purposes 
and for urban and inter-urban communications will all 
be managed electrically from common generating sta- 
tions. And the trend of political and social speculation 
points decidedly to the conclusion that so soon as it 
passes out of the experimental stage, the supply of 
electrical energy, just like drainage and the supply of 
water, will fall to the local authority, Moreover, the 
local authority w r ill be the universal landowner. Upon 
that point so extreme an individualist as Herbert Spencer 
was in agreement with the Socialist. In Utopia we con- 
clude that, whatever other types of property may exist, 
all natural sources of force, and indeed all strictly natural 
products, coal, water power, and the like, are inalienably 
vested in the local authorities (which, in order to secure 
the maximum of convenience and administrative effi- 
ciency, will probably control areas as large sometimes 
as half England) . they will generate electricity by water 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 83 

power, by combustion, by wind or tide or whatever other 
natural force is available, and this electricity will be 
devoted, some of it to the authority's lighting and other 
public works, some of it, as a subsidy, to the World- 
State authority which controls the high roads, the great 
railways, the inns and other apparatus of world com- 
munication, and the rest will pass on to private indi- 
viduals or to distributing companies at a uniform fixed 
rate for private lighting and heating, for machinery and 
industrial applications of all sorts. Such an arrange- 
ment of affairs will necessarily involve a vast amount 
of book-keeping between the various authorities, the 
World-State government and the customers, and this 
book-keeping will naturally be done most conveniently 
in units of physical energy. 

It is not incredible that the assessment of the various 
local administrations for the central world government 
would be already calculated upon the estimated total 
of energy, periodically available, in each locality, and 
booked and spoken of in these physical units. Accounts 
between central and local governments could be kept in 
these terms. Moreover, one may imagine Utopian local 
authorities making contracts in which payment would 
be no longer in coinage upon the gold basis, but in notes 
good for so many thousands or millions of units of energy 
at one or other of the generating stations. 

Now the problems of economic theory will have under- 
gone an enormous clarification if, instead of measuring 
in fluctuating money values, the same scale of energy 
units can be extended to their discussion, if. in fact. 



84 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

the idea of trading could be entirely eliminated. In my 
Utopia, at any rate, this has been done, the production 
and distribution of common commodities have been 
expressed as a problem in the conversion of energy, and 
the scheme that Utopia was now discussing was the 
application of this idea of energy as the standard of 
value to the entire Utopian coinage. Every one of those 
giant local authorities was to be free to issue energy 
notes against the security of its surplus of saleable avail- 
able energy, and to make all its contracts for payment 
in those notes up to a certain maximum denned by the 
amount of energy produced and disposed of in that 
locality in the previous year. This power of issue was 
to be renewed just as rapidly as the notes came in for 
redemption. In a world without boundaries, with a 
population largely migratory and emancipated from 
locality, the price of the energy notes of these various 
local bodies would constantly tend to be uniform, be- 
cause employment would constantly shift into the areas 
where energy was cheap. Accordingly, the price of so 
many millions of units of energy at any particular 
moment in coins of the gold currency would be approxi- 
mately the same throughout the world. It was proposed 
to select some particular day when the economic atmos- 
phere was distinctly equable, and to declare a fixed ratio 
between the gold coinage and the energy notes ; each 
gold Lion and each Lion of credit representing exactly 
the number of energy units it could buy on that day. 
The old gold coinage was at once to cease to be legal 
tender beyond certain denned limits, except to the central 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 85 

government, which would not reissue it as it came in. 
It was, in fact, to become a temporary token coinage, 
a token coinage of full value for the day of conversion 
at any rate, if not afterwards, under the new standard 
of energy, and to be replaceable by an ordinary token 
coinage as time went on. The old computation by Lions 
and the values of the small change of daily life were there- 
fore to suffer no disturbance whatever. 

The economists of Utopia, as I apprehended them, 
had a different method and a very different system of 
theories from those I have read on earth, and this makes 
my exposition considerably more difficult. This article 
upon which I base my account floated before me in an 
unfamiliar, perplexing, and dream-like phraseology. Yet 
I brought away an impression that here was a Tightness 
that earthly economists have failed to grasp. Few 
earthly economists have been able to disentangle them- 
selves from patriotisms and politics, and their obses- 
sion has always been international trade. Here in 
Utopia the World State cuts that away from beneath 
their feet ; there jyje_EU>~ffiiports but meteorites, and 
nQ_e:xpQrl__aix all. Trading is the eartftly economists' 
initial notion, and they start from perplexing and in- 
soluble riddles about exchange value, insoluble because 
all trading finally involves individual preferences which 
are incalculable and unique. Nowhere do they seem 
to be handling really defined standards, every economic 
dissertation and discussion reminds one more strongly 
than the last of the game of croquet Alice played in 
Wonderland, when the mallets were flamingoes and the 



86 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

balls were hedgehogs and crawled away, and the hoops 
were soldiers and kept 1 getting up and walking about. 
But economics in Utopia must be, it seems to me, not 
a theory of trading based on bad psychology, but physics 
applied to problems in the theory of sociology. The 
general problem of Utopian economics is to state the 
conditions of the most efficient application of the steadily 
increasing quantities of material energy the progress of 
science makes available for human service, to the gen- 
eral needs of mankind. Human labour and existing 
material are dealt with in relation to that. Trading and 
relative wealth are merely episodical in such a scheme. 
The trend of the article I read, as I understood it, was 
that a monetary system based upon a relatively small 
amount of gold, upon which the business of the whole 
world had hitherto been done., fluctuated unreasonably 
and supplied no real criterion of well-being, that the 
nominal values of things and enterprises had no clear 
and simple relation to the real physical prosperity of 
the community, that the nominal wealth of a com- 
munity in millions of pounds or dollars or Lions, meas- 
ured nothing but the quantity of hope in the air, and 
an increase of confidence meant an inflation of credit and 
a pessimistic phase a collapse of this hallucination of 
possessions. The new standards, this advocate reasoned, 
were to alter all that, and it seemed to me they would. 

I have tried to indicate the drift of these remarkable 
proposals, but about them clustered an elaborate mass 
of keen and temperate discussion. Into the details of 
that discussion I will not enter now, nor am J sure I 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 87 

am qualified to render the multitudinous aspect 01 this 
complicated question at all precisely. I read the whole 
thing in the course of an hour or two of rest after lunch 
it was either the second or third day of my stay in 
Utopia and we were sitting in a little inn at the end 
of the Lake of Uri. We had loitered there, and I had 
fallen reading because of a shower of rain. . . . But 
certainly as I read it the proposition struck me as a 
singularly simple and attractive one, and its exposition 
opened out to me for the first time clearly, in a compre- 
hensive outline, the general conception of the economic 
nature of the Utopian State. 



3 



The difference between the social and economic sci- 
ences as they exist in our world * and in this Utopia 
deserves perhaps a word or so more. I write with the 
utmost diffidence, because upon earth economic science 
has been raised to a very high level of tortuous abstrac- 
tion by the industry of its professors, and I can claim 
neither a patient student's intimacy with their pro- 
ductions nor what is more serious anything but the 
most generalised knowledge of what their Utopian 
equivalents have achieved. The vital nature of eco- 

* But see Gidding's Principles of Sociology, a modern and richly 
suggestive American work, imperfectly appreciated by the British 
student. See also Walter Bagehot's Economic Studies. 



88 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

nomic issues to a Utopia necessitates, however, some 
attempt at interpretation between the two. 

In Utopia there is no distinct and separate science 
of economics. Many problems that we should regard 
as economic come within the scope of Utopian psy- 
chology. My Utopians make two divisions of the 
science of psychology, first, the general psychology of 
individuals, a sort of mental physiology separated by 
no definite line from physiology proper, and secondly, the 
psychology of relationship between individuals. This 
second is an exhaustive study of the reaction of people 
upon each other and of all possible relationships. It is 
a science of human aggregations, of all possible family 
groupings, of neighbours and neighbourhood, of com- 
panies, associations, unions, secret and public societies, 
religious groupings, of common ends and intercourse, 
and of the methods of intercourse and collective decision 
that hold human groups together, and finally of govern- 
ment and the State. The elucidation of economic rela- 
tionships, depending as it does on the nature of the 
hypothesis of human aggregation actually in operation 
at any time, is considered to be subordinate and sub- 
sequent to this general science of Sociology. Political 
economy and economics,j.n_our world now^consist of a 
hopeless muddle of social assumptions and preposterous 
psychology, and a few geographical and_pJiy_sicaLge.rigr-^ 
alisations. Its ingredients will be classified out and 
widely separated in Utopian thought. On the one hand 
there will be the study of physical economies, ending in 
the descriptive treatment of society as an organisation 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 89 

for the conversion of all the available energy in nature 
to the material ends of mankind a physical sociology 
which will be already at such a stage of practical devel- 
opment as to be giving the world this token coinage 
representing energy and on the other there will be 
the study of economic problems as problems in the 
division of labour, having regard to a social organisa- 
tion whose main ends are reproduction and education 
in an atmosphere of personal freedom. Each of these 
inquiries, working unencumbered by the other, will be 
continually contributing fresh valid conclusions for the 
use of the practical administrator. 

In no region of intellectual activity will our hypo- 
thesis of freedom from tradition be of more value in 
devising a Utopia than here. From its beginning the 
earthly study of economics has been infertile and un- 
helpful, because of the mass of unanalysed and scarcely 
suspected assumptions upon which it rested. The facts 
were ignored that trade is a bye-product and not an 
essential factor in social life, that property is a plastic 
and fluctuating convention, that value is capable of 
impersonal treatment only in the case of the most 
generalised requirements. Wealth was measured by 
the standards of exchange. Society was regarded as 
a practically unlimited number of avaricious adult units 
incapable of any other subordinate groupings than busi- 
ness partnerships, and the sources of competition were 
assumed to be inexhaustible. Upon such quicksands 
rose an edifice that aped the securities of material sci- 
ence, developed a technical jargon and professed the 



90 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

discovery of " laws." Our liberation from these false 
presumptions through the rhetoric of Carlyle and Ruskin 
and the activities of the Socialists, is more apparent 
than real. The old edifice oppresses us still, repaired 
and altered by indifferent builders, underpinned in 
places, and with a slight change of name. " Political 
Economy " has been painted out, and instead we read 
" Economics under entirely new management." Modern 
Economics differs mainly from old Political Economy in 
having produced no Adam Smith. The old " Political 
Economy " made certain generalisations, and they were 
mostly wrong ; new Economics evades generalisations, 
and seems to lack the intellectual power to make them. 
The science hangs like a gathering fog in a valley, a fog 
which begins nowhere and goes nowhere, an incidental, 
unmeaning inconvenience to passers-by. Its most 
ty_pjcal__exponents _dispjay^_a_disposition to disavow 

to claim consideration as 



" experts," and to make immediate political application 
of that conceded claim. Now Newton, Darwin, Dalton, 
Davy, Joule, and Adam Smith did not affect this " ex- 
pert " hankey-pankey, becoming enough in a hair- 
dresser or a fashionable physician, but indecent in a 
philosopher or a man of science. In this state of im- 
potent expertness, however, or in some equally unsound 
state, economics must struggle on a science that is 
no science, a floundering lore wallowing in a mud of 
statistics until either the study of the material organ- 
isation of production on the one hand as a development 
of physics and geography, or the study of social aggre- 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 91 

gation on the other, renders enduring foundations pos- 
sible. 



4 

The older Utopias were all relatively small states ; 
Plato's Republic, for- example, was to be smaller than 
the average English borough, and no distinction was 
made between the Family, the Local Government, and 
the State. Plato and Campanella for all that the 
latter was a Christian priest carried communism to 
its final point and prescribed even a community of hus- 
bands and wives, an idea that was brought at last to 
the test of effectual experiment in the Oneida Com- 
munity of New York State (1848-1879). This latter 
body did not long survive its founder, at least as a 
veritable communism, by reason of the insurgent indi- 
vidualism of its vigorous sons. More, too, denied 
privacy and ruled an absolute community of goods, at 
any rate, and so, coming to the Victorian Utopias, did 
Cabet. But Cabet's communism was one of the " free 
store " type, and the goods were yours only after you 
had requisitioned them. That seems the case in the 
" Nowhere " of Morris also. Compared with the older 
writers Bellamy and Morris have a vivid sense of indi- 
vidual separation, and their departure from the old 
homogeneity is sufficiently marked to justify a doubt 
whether there will be any more thoroughly communistic 
Utopias for ever. 



92 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

A Utopia such as this present one, written in the 
opening of the Twentieth Century, and after the most 
exhaustive discussion nearly a century long between 
Communistic and Socialistic ideas on the one hand, and 
Individualism on the other, emerges upon a sort of effec- 
tual conclusion to those controversies. The two parties 
have so chipped and amended each other's initial pro- 
positions that, indeed, except for the labels still flutter- 
ingly adhesive to the implicated men, it is hard to 
choose between them. Each side established a good 
many propositions, and we profit by them all. We of 
the succeeding generation can see quite clearly that for 
the most part the heat and zeal of these discussions 
arose in the confusion of a quantitative for a qualitative 
question. To the onlooker, both Individualism and 
Socialism are, in the absolute, absurdities ; the one 
would make men the slaves of the violent or rich, the 
other the slaves of the State official, and the way of 
sanity runs, perhaps even sinuously, down the inter- 
vening valley. Happily the dead past buries its dead, 
and it is not our function now to adjudicate the pre- 
ponderance of victory. In the very days when our 
political and economic order is becoming steadily more 
Socialistic, our ideals of intercourse turn more and more 
to a fuller recognition of the claims of individuality. 
The State is to be progressive, it is no longer to be 
static, and this alters the general condition of the Uto- 
pian problem profoundly ; we have to provide not only 
for food and clothing, for order and health, but for 
initiative. The factor that leads the World State on 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 93 

from one phase of development to the next is the inter- 
play of individualities ; to speak teleologically, the 
world exists for the sake of and through initiative, and 
individuality is the method of initiative. Each man 
and woman, to the extent that his or her individuality 
is marked, breaks the law of precedent, transgresses the 
general formula, and makes a new experiment for the 
direction of the life force. It is impossible, therefore, 
for the State, which represents all and is preoccupied 
by the average, to make effectual experiments and in- 
telligent innovations, and so supply the essential sub- 
stance of life. As against the individual the state 
represents the species, in the case of the Utopian World 
State it absolutely represents the species. The indi- 
vidual emerges from the species, makes his experiment, 
and either fails, dies, and comes to an end, or succeeds 
and impresses himself in offspring, in consequences and 
results, intellectual, material and moral, upon the world. 

Biologically the species is the accumulation of the - 
experiments of all its successful^ individuals since the / 
beginning, and the World State of the Modern Utopist . C^ 
will, in its economic aspect, hp a compendiurn_of estab- JM^ 
lishedeconomic experience, about which individual enter- 
prise will be continually experimenting, either to fail 
and pass, or to succeed and at last become incorporated 
with the undying organism of the World State. This 
organism is the universal rule, the common restriction, 
the rising level platform on which individualities stand. 

The World State in this ideal presents itself as the 
sole landowner of the earth, with the great local govern- 



94 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

ments I have adumbrated, the local municipalities, 
holding, as it were, feudally under it as landlords. The 
State or these subordinates holds all the sources of 
energy, and either directly or through its tenants, 
farmers and agents, develops these sources, and renders 
the energy available for the work of life. It or its 
tenants will produce food, and so human energy, and 
the exploitation of coal and electric power, and the 
powers of wind and wave and water will be within its 
right. It will pour out this energy by assignment and 
lease and acquiescence and what not upon its individual 
citizens. It will .maintain order, maintain roads, main- 
tain a cheap and efficient administration of justice, main- 
tain cheap and rapid locomotion and be the common 
carrier of the planet, convey and distribute labour, 
control, let, or administer all natural productions, pay 
for and secure healthy births and a healthy and vigorous 
new generation, maintain the public health, coin money 
and sustain standards of measurement, subsidise re- 
search, and reward such commercially unprofitable 
undertakings as benefit the community as a whole ; 
subsidise when needful chairs of criticism and authors 
and publications, and collect and distribute information. 
The energy developed and the employment afforded by 
the State will descend like water that the sun has sucked 
out of the sea to fall upon a mountain range, and back 
to the sea again it will come at last, debouching in 
ground rent and royalty and license fees, in the fees of 
travellers and profits upon carrying and coinage and 
the like, in death duty, transfer tax, legacy and for- 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 95 

feiture, returning to the sea. Between the clouds and 
the sea it will run, as a river system runs, down through 
a great region of individual enterprise and interplay, 
whose freedom it will sustain. In that intermediate 
region between the kindred heights and deeps those 
beginnings and promises will arise that are the essential 
significance, the essential substance, of life. From 
our human point of view the mountains and sea are 
for the habitable lands that lie between. So likewise 
the State is for Individualities. The State is for In- 
dividuals, the law is for freedoms, the world is for ex- 
periment, experience, and change : these are the 
fundamental beliefs upon which a modern Utopia 
must go. 



5 

Within this scheme, which makes the State the 
source of all energy, and the final legatee, what will be 
the nature of the property a man may own ? Under 
modern conditions indeed, under any conditions a 
man without some negotiable property is a man without 
freedom, and the extent of his property is very largely 
the measure of his freedom. Without any property, 
without even shelter or food, a man has no choice but 
to set about getting these things ; he is in servitude to 
his needs until he has secured property to satisfy them. 
But with a certain small property a man is free to do 
many things, t6 take a fortnight's holiday when he 



96 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

chooses, for example, and to try this new departure 
from his work or that ; with so much more, he may 
take a year of freedom and go to the ends of the earth ; 
with so much more, he may obtain elaborate apparatus 
and try curious novelties, build himself houses and 
make gardens, establish businesses and make experiments 
at large. Very speedily, under terrestrial conditions, 
the property of a man may reach such proportions 
that his freedom oppresses the freedom, of others. 
Here, again, is a quantitative question, an adjustment 
of conflicting freedoms, a quantitative question that too 
many people insist on making a qualitative one. 

The object sought in the code of property laws that 
one would find in operation in Utopia would be the 
same object that pervades the whole Utopian organisa- 
tion, namely, a universal maximum of individual 
freedom. "Whatever far-reaching movements the State 
or great rich men or private corporations may make, 
the starvation by any complication of employment, the 
unwilling deportation, the destruction of alternatives 
to servile submissions, must not ensue. Beyond such 
qualifications, the object of Modern Utopian states- 
manship will be to secure to a man the freedom given 
by all his legitimate property, that is to say, by all the 
values his toil or skill or foresight and courage ! 
brought into being. Whatever he has justly mad, 
has a right to keep, that is obvious enough ; but he 
will also have a right to sell and exchange, and so this 
question of what may be property takes really the form 
cf what may a man buy in Utopia ? 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 97 

A modern Utopian most assuredly must have a prac- 
tically unqualified property in all those things that 
become, as it were, by possession, extensions and ex- 
pi essions of his personality ; his clothing, his jewels, 
the tools of his employment, his books, the objects of 
art he may have bought or made, his personal weapons 
(if Utopia have need of such things), insignia, and so 
forth. All such things that he has bought with his 
money or acquired provided he is not a professional 
or habitual dealer in such property will be inalienably 
his, his to give oriend or keep, free even from taxation. 
So intimate is this sort of property that I have no 
doubt Utopia will give a man posthumous rights over 
it will permit him to assign it to a successor with 
at the utmost the payment of a small redemption. 
A horse, perhaps, in certain districts, or a bicycle, or 
any such mechanical conveyance personally used, *the 
Utopians might find it well to rank with these posses- 
sions. No doubt, too, a house and privacy owned and 
occupied by a man, and even a man's own household 
furniture, might be held to stand as high or almost as 
high in the property scale, might be taxed as lightly 
and transferred under only a slightly heavier redemp- 
tion, provided he had not let these things on hire, or 
otherwise alienated them from his intimate self. A 
thorough-going, Democratic Socialist will no doubt be 
inclined at first to object that if the Utopians make 
these things a specially free sort of property in this 
way, men would spend much more upon them than 
they would otherwise do, but indeed that will be an 

4 



98 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

excellent thing. We are too much affected by the 
needy atmosphere of our own mismanaged world. In 
Utopia no one will have to hunger because some love 
to make and have made and own and cherish beautiful 
things. To give this much of property to individuals 
will tend to make clothing, ornamentation, implements, 
books, and all the arts finer and more beautiful, be- 
cause by buying such things a man will secure some- 
thing inalienable save in the case of bankruptcy for 
himself and for those who belong to him. Moreover, 
a man may in his lifetime set aside sums to ensure 
special advantages of education and care for the im- 
mature children of himself and others, and in this 
manner also exercise a posthumous right.* 

For all other property, the Utopians will have a 
scantier respect ; even money unspent by a man, and 
debts to him that bear no interest; will at his death 
stand upon a lower level than these things. What he 
did not choose to gather and assimilate to himself, or 
assign for the special education of his children, the 
State will share in the lion's proportion with heir and 
legatee. 

This applies, for example, to the property that a 
man creates and acquires in business enterprises, which 
are presumably undertaken for gain, and as a means of 
living rather than for themselves. All new machinery, 
all new methods, all uncertain and variable and non- 

* But a Statute of Mortmain will set a distinct time limit to the 
continuance of such benefactions. A periodic revision of endowments 
is a necessary feature in any modern Utopia. 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 99 

universal undertakings, are no business for the State j 
they commence always as experiments of unascertained 
value, and next after the invention of money, there is 
no invention has so facilitated freedom and progress as 
the invention of the limited liability company to do 
this work of trial and adventure. The abuses, the 
necessary reforms of company law on earth, are no con- 
cern of ours here and now, suffice it that in a Modern 
Utopia such laws must be supposed to be as perfect as 
mortal laws can possibly be made. Caveat vendor will 
be a sound qualification of Caveat emptor in the beau- 
tifully codified Utopian law. Whether the Utopian 
company will be allowed to prefer this class of share 
to that or to issue debentures, whether indeed usury, 
that is to say lending money at fixed rates of interest, 
will be permitted at all in Utopia, one may venture 
to doubt. But whatever the nature of the shares a 
man may hold, they will all be sold at his death, and 
whatever he has not clearly assigned for special educa- 
tional purposes will with possibly some fractional 
concession to near survivors lapse to the State. The 
" safe investment," that permanent, undying claim 
upon the community, is just one of those things Utopia 
will discourage ; which indeed the developing security 
of civilisation quite automatically discourages through 
the fall in the rate of interest. As we shall see at a 
later stage, the State will insure the children of every 
citizen, and those legitimately dependent upon him, 
against the inconvenience of his death ; it will carry 
out all reasonable additional dispositions he may have 



ioo A MODERN UTOPIA. 

made for them in the same event ; and it will insure 
him against old age and infirmity ; and the object of 
Utopian economics will be to give a man every induce- 
ment to spend his surplus money in intensifying the 
quality of his surroundings, either by economic adven- 
tures and experiments, which may yield either losses 
or large profits, or in increasing the beauty, the pleasure, 
the abundance and promise of life. 

Besides strictly personal possessions and shares in 
business adventures, Utopia will no doubt permit 
associations of its citizens to have a property in various 
sorts of contracts and concessions, in leases of agri- 
cultural and other land, for example ; in houses they 
may have built, factories and machinery they may have 
made, and the like. And if a citizen prefer to adven- 
ture into business single-handed, he will have all the 
freedoms of enterprise enjoyed by a company ; in 
business affairs he will be a company of one, and his 
single share will be dealt with at his death like any other 
shares. ... So much for the second kind of property. 
And these two kinds of property will probably ex- 
haust the sorts of property a Utopian may possess. 

The trend of modern thought is entirely against 
private property in land or natural objects or products, 
and in Utopia these things will be the inalienable 
property of the World State. Subject to the rights of 
free locomotion, land will be leased out to companies or 
individuals, but in view of the unknown necessities of 
the future never for a longer period than, let us say, 
fifty years. 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. ici 

The property of a parent in his children, and of a 
husband in his wife, seems to be undergoing a steadily 
increasing qualification in the world of to-day, but the 
discussion of the Utopian state of affairs in regard to 
such property may be better reserved until marriage 
becomes our topic. Suffice it here to remark, that the 
increasing control of a child's welfare and upbringing 
by the community, and the growing disposition to 
limit and tax inheritance are complementary aspects 
of the general tendency to regard the welfare and free 
intraplay of future generations no longer as the con- 
cern of parents and altruistic individuals, but as the 
predominant issue of statesmanship, and the duty and 
moral meaning of the world community as a whole. 



6 

From the conception of mechanical force as coming 
in from Nature to the service of man, a conception the 
Utopian proposal of a coinage based on energy units 
would emphasise, arise profound contrasts between the 
modern and the classical Utopias. Except for a 
meagre use of water power for milling, and the wind 
for sailing so meagre in the latter case that the clas- 
sical world never contrived to do without the galley 
slave and a certain restricted help from oxen in plough- 
ing, and from horses in locomotion, all the energy 
that sustained the old-fashioned State was derived 



102 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

from the muscular exertion of toiling men. They 
ran their world by hand. Continual bodily labour 
was a condition of social existence. It is only with 
the coming of coal burning, of abundant iron and steel, 
and of scientific knowledge that this condition has been 
changed. To-day, I suppose, if it were possible to 
indicate, in units of energy, the grand total of work 
upon which the social fabric of the United States or 
England rests, it would be found that a vastly pre- 
ponderating moiety is derived from non-human sources, 
from coal and liquid fuel, and explosives and wind and 
water. There is every indication of a steady increase 
in this proportion of mechanical energy, in this eman- 
cipation of men from the necessity of physical labour. 
There appears no limit to the invasion of life by the 
machine. 

Now it is only in the last three hundred years that 
any human being seems to have anticipated this. It 
stimulates the imagination to remark how entirely it 
was overlooked as a modifying cause in human develop- 
ment.* Plato clearly had no ideas about machines at 
all as a force affecting social organisation. There was 
nothing in his world to suggest them to him. I sup- 
pose there arose no invention, no new mechanical 
appliance or method of the slightest social importance 
through all his length of years. He never thought of 
a State that did not rely for its force upon human 
muscle, just as he never thought of a State that was 

* It is interesting to note how little even Bacon seems to see of 
this, in his New Atlantis. 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 103 

not .primarily organised for warfare hand to hand. 
Political and moral inventions he saw enough of and 
to spare, and in that direction he still stimulates the 
imagination. But in regard to all material possibilities 
he deadens rather than stimulates.* An infinitude of 
nonsense about the Greek mind would never have been 
written if the distinctive intellectual and artistic quality 
of Plato's time, its extraordinarily clear definition of 
certain material conditions as absolutely permanent, 
coupled with its politico-social instability, had been 
borne in mind. The food of the Greek imagination 
was the very antithesis of our own nourishment. We 
are educated by our circumstances to think no revolu- 
tion in appliances and economic organisation incredible, 
our minds play freely about possibilities that would 
have struck the men of the Academy as outrageous 
extravagance, and it is in regard to politico-social ex- 
pedients that our imaginations fail. Sparta, for all the 
evidence of history, is scarcely more credible to us than 
a motor-car throbbing in the agora would have been 
to Socrates. 

By sheer inadvertence, therefore, Plato commenced 
the tradition of Utopias without machinery, a tradi- 
tion we find Morris still loyally following, except for 
certain mechanical barges and such-like toys, in his 
News from Nowhere. There are some foreshadowings 
of mechanical possibilities in the New Atlantis, but it 

* The lost Utopia of Hippodamus provided rewards for inventors, 
but unless Aristotle misunderstood him, and it is certainly the fate of 
all Utopias to be more or less misread, the inventions contemplated 
were political devices. 



104 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

is only in the nineteenth century that Utopias appeared 
in which the fact is clearly recognised that the social 
fabric rests no longer upon human labour. It was, I 
believe, Cabet * who first in a Utopian work insisted upon 
the escape of man from irksome labours through the 
use of machinery. He is the great primitive of modern 
Utopias, and Bellamy is his American equivalent. 
Hitherto, either slave labour (Phaleas),f or at least class 
distinctions involving unavoidable labour in the lower 
class, have been assumed as Plato does, and as Bacon 
in the New Atlantis probably intended to do (More 
gave his Utopians bondsmen sans phrase for their most 
disagreeable toil) ; or there is as in Morris and the 
outright Return-to-Nature Utopians a bold make- 
believe that all toil may be made a joy, and with that 
a levelling down of all society to an equal participation 
in labour. But indeed this is against all the observed 
behaviour of mankind. It needed the Olympian un- 
worldliness of an irresponsible rich man of the share- 
holding type, a Ruskin or a Morris playing at life, to 
imagine as much. Road-making under Mr. Ruskin's 
auspices was a joy at Oxford no doubt, and a distinction, 
and it still remains a distinction ; it proved the least 
contagious of practices. And Hawthorne did not find 
bodily toil anything more than the curse the Bible says 
it is, at Brook Farm.J 

If toil is a blessing, never was blessing so effectually 

* Cabet, Voyage en Icarie, 1848. 

t Aristotle's Politics, Bk. II., Ch. VIII. 

t The Blythedale Experiment, and see also his Notebook. 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 105 

disguised, and the very people who tell us that, hesitate 
to suggest more than a beautiful ease in the endless 
day of Heaven. A certain amount of bodily or mental 
exercise, a considerable amount of doing things under 
the direction of one's free imagination is quite another 
matter. Artistic production, for example, when it is 
at its best, when a man is freely obeying himself, and 
not troubling to please others, is really not toil at all. 
It is quite a different thing digging potatoes, as boys 
say, " for a lark." and digging them because otherwise 
you will starve, digging them day after day as a dull, 
unavoidable imperative. The essence of toil is that 
imperative, and the fact that the attention must cramp 
itself to the work in hand that it excludes freedom, 
and not that it involves fatigue. So long as anything 
but a quasi-savage life depended upon toil, so long was 
it hopeless to expect mankind to do anything but 
struggle to confer just as much of this blessing as pos- 
sible upon one another. But now that the new conditions 
physical science is bringing about, not only dispense 
with man as a source of energy but supply the hope that 
all routine work may be made automatic, it is becoming 
conceivable that presently there may be no need for 
anyone to toil habitually at all ; that a labouring class 
that is to say, a class of workers without personal 
initiative will become unnecessary to the world of men. 
The plain message physical science has for the world 
at large is this, that were our political and social and 
moral devices only as well contrived to their ends as a 
linotype machine, an antiseptic operating plant, or an 



106 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

electric tram-car, there need now at the present moment 
be no appreciable toil in the world, and only the smallest 
fraction of the pain, the fear, and the anxiety that now 
makes human life so doubtful in its value. There is 
more than enough for everyone alive. Science stands, a 
too competent servant, behind her wrangling underbred 
masters, holding out resources, devices, and remedies 
they are too stupid to use.* And on its material side 
a modern Utopia must needs present these gifts as 
taken, and show a world that is really abolishing the 
need of labour, abolishing the last base reason for any- 
one's servitude or inferiority. 



7 



The effectual abolition of a labouring and servile 
class will make itself felt in every detail of the inn 
that will shelter us, of the bedrooms we shall occupy. 
You conceive my awakening to all these things on the 
morning after our arrival. I shall lie for a minute or 
so with my nose peeping over the coverlet, agreeably 
and gently coming awake, and with some vague night- 
mare of sitting at a common table with an unavoidable 
dustman in green and gold called Boffin, f fading out 
of my mind. Then I should start up. You figure 

* See that most suggestive little book, Twentieth Century Inventions, 
by Mr. George Sutherland. 
r~ -\ Vide William Morris's News from Nowhere. 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 107 

my apprehe isive, startled inspection of my chamber. 
" Where 'am I ? " that classic phrase, recurs. Then I 
perceive quite clearly that I am in bed in Utopia. 

Utopia ! The word is enough to bring anyone out 
of bed, to the nearest window, but thence I see no more 
than the great mountain mass behind the inn, a very 
terrestrial looking mountain mass. I return to the 
contrivances about me, and make my examination as 
I dress, pausing garment in hand to hover over first 
this thing of interest and then that. 

The room is, of course, very clear and clean and 
simple ; not by any means cheaply equipped, but de- 
signed to economise the labour of redding and repair just 
as much as is possible. It is beautifully proportioned, 
and rather lower than most rooms I know on earth. 
There is no fireplace, and I am perplexed by that until 
I find a thermometer beside six switches on the wall. 
Above this switch-board is a brief instruction : one 
switch warms the floor, which is not carpeted, but 
covered by a substance like soft oilcloth ; one warms 
the mattress (which is of metal with resistance coils 
threaded to and fro in it) ; and the others warm the 
wall in various degrees, each directing current through 
a separate system of resistances. The casement does 
not open, but above, flush with the ceiling, a noiseless 
rapid fan pumps air out of the room. The air enters 
by a Tobin shaft. There is a recess dressing-room, 
equipped with a bath and all that is necessary to one's 
toilette, and the water, one remarks, is warmed, if one 
desires it warm, by passing it through an electrically 



io8 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

heated spiral of tubing. A cake of soap crops out of 
a store machine on the turn of a handle, and when 
you have done with it, you drop that and your soiled 
towels and so forth, which also are given you by machines, 
into a little box, through the bottom of which they drop 
at once, and sail down a smooth shaft. A little notice 
tells you the price of your room, and you gather the 
price is doubled if you do not leave the toilette as you 
found it. Beside the bed, and to be lit at night by a 
handy switch over the pillow, is a little clock, its face 
flush with the wall. The room has no corners to gather 
dirt, wall meets floor with a gentle curve, and the apart- 
ment could be swept out effectually by a few strokes 
of a mechanical sweeper. The door frames and window 
frames are of metal, rounded and impervious to draught. 
You are politely requested to turn a handle at the foot 
of your bed before leaving the room, and forthwith the 
frame turns up into a vertical position, and the bed- 
clothes hang airing. You stand at the doorway and 
realise that there remains not a minute's work for any- 
one to do. Memories of the foetid disorder of many an 
earthly bedroom after a night's use float across your 
mind. 

And you must not imagine this dustless, spotless, 
sweet apartment as anything but beautiful. Its ap- 
pearance is a little unfamiliar of course, but all the 
muddle of dust-collecting hangings and witless orna- 
ment that cover the earthly bedroom, the valances, 
the curtains to check the draught from the ill-fitting 
wood windows, the worthless irrelevant pictures, usually 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 109 

a little askew, the dusty carpets, and all the para- 
phernalia about the dirty, black-leaded fireplace are 
gone. But the faintly tinted walls are framed with 
just one clear coloured line, as finely placed as the 
member of a Greek capital ; the door handles and the 
lines of the panels of the door, the two chairs, the frame- 
work of the bed, the writing table, have all that final 
simplicity, that exquisite finish of contour that is be- 
gotten of sustained artistic effort. The graciously 
shaped windows each frame a picture since they are 
draughtless the window seats are no mere mockeries as 
are the window seats of earth and on the sill, the 
sole thing to need attention in the room, is one little 
bowl of blue Alpine flowers. 

The same exquisite simplicity meets one downstairs. 

Our landlord sits down at table with us for a moment, 
and seeing we do not understand the electrically heated 
coffee-pot before us, shows us what to do. Coffee and 
milk we have, in the Continental fashion, and some 
excellent rolls and butter. 

He is a swarthy little man, our landlord, and over- 
night we saw him preoccupied with other guests. But 
we have risen either late or early by Utopian standards, 
we know not which, and this morning he has us to 
himself. His bearing is kindly and inoffensive, but he 
cannot conceal the curiosity that possesses him. His 
eye meets ours with a mute inquiry, and then as we 
fall to, we catch him scrutinising our cuffs, our gar- 
ments, our boots, our faces, our table manners. He 
asks nothing at first, but says a word or so about our 



no A MODERN UTOPIA. 

night's comfort and the day's weather, phrases that 
have an air of being customary. Then comes a silence 
that is interrogative. 

" Excellent coffee," I say to fill the gap. 

" And excellent rolls," says my botanist. 

Our landlord indicates his sense of our approval. 

A momentary diversion is caused by the entry of 
an elfin-tressed little girl, who stares at us half impu- 
dently, half shyly, with bright black eyes, hesitates at 
the botanist's clumsy smile and nod, and then goes and 
stands by her father and surveys us steadfastly. 

" You have come far ? " ventures our landlord, patting 
his daughter's shoulder. 

I glance at the botanist. " Yes," I say, " we 
have." 

I expand. " We have come so far that this country 
of yours seems very strange indeed to us." 

" The mountains ? " 

" Not only the mountains." 

" You came up out of the Ticino valley ? " 

" No not that way." 

" By the Oberalp ? " 

" No." 

" The Furka ? " 

" No." 

" Not up from the lake ? " 

" No." 

He looks puzzled. 

" We came," I say, " from another world." 

He seems trying to understand. Then a thought 



UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. in 

strikes him, and he sends away his little girl with a 
needless message to her mother. 

" Ah ! " he says. " Another world eh ? Mean- 
ing--?" 

" Another world far in the deeps of space." 

Then at the expression of his face one realises that 
a Modern Utopia will probably keep its more intelli- 
gent citizens for better work than inn-tending. He 
is evidently inaccessible to the idea we think of putting 
before him. He stares at us a moment, and then re- 
marks, " There's the book to sign." 

We find ourselves confronted with a book, a little 
after the fashion of the familiar hotel visitors' book 
of earth. He places this before us, and beside it puts 
pen and ink and a slab, upon which ink has been freshly 
smeared. 

" Thumbmarks," says my scientific friend hastily in 
English. 

" You show me how to do it," I say as quickly. 

He signs first, and I look over his shoulder. 

He is displaying more readiness than I should have 
expected. The book is ruled in broad transverse lines, 
and has a space for a name, for a number, and a thumb- 
mark. He puts his thumb upon the slab and makes 
the thumbmark first with the utmost deliberation. 
Meanwhile he studies the other two entries. The 
" numbers " of the previous guests above are com- 
plex muddles of letters and figures. He writes his name, 
then with a calm assurance writes down his number, 
A.M.a.i6o7.2.a/3. I am wrung with momentary 



112 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

admiration. I follow his example, and fabricate an 
equally imposing signature. We think ourselves very 
clever. The landlord proffers finger bowls for our 
thumbs, and his eye goes, just a little curiously, to 
our entries. 

I decide it is advisable to pay and go before any 
conversation about our formulae arises. 

As we emerge into the corridor, and the morning 
sunlight of the Utppian world, I see the landlord bend- 
ing over the book. 

" Come on," I say. " The most tiresome thing in the 
world is explanations, and I perceive that if we do not 
get along, they will fall upon us now." 

I glance back to discover the landlord and a grace- 
fully robed woman standing outside the pretty sim- 
plicity of the Utopian inn, watching us doubtfully as 
we recede. 

" Come on," I insist. 



8 

We should go towards the Schoellenen gorge, and as 
we went, our fresh morning senses would gather to- 
gether a thousand factors for our impression of this 
more civilised world. A Modern Utopia will have 
done with yapping about nationality, and so the ugly 
fortifications, the barracks and military defilements of 
the earthly vale of Urseren will be wanting. Instead 
there will be a great multitude of gracious little houses 






UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 113 

clustering in college-like groups, no doubt about their 
common kitchens and halls, down and about the valley 
slopes. And there will be many more trees, and a 
great variety of trees all the world will have been 
ransacked for winter conifers. Despite the height of 
the valley there will be a double avenue along the road. 
This high road with its tramway would turn with us 
to descend the gorge, and we should hesitate upon the 
adventure of boarding the train. But now we should 
have the memory of our landlord's curious eye upon 
us, and we should decide at last to defer the risk of 
explanations such an enterprise might precipitate. 

We should go by the great road for a time, and note 
something of the difference between Utopian and ter- 
restrial engineering. 

The tramway, the train road, the culverts, and bridges, 
the Urnerloch tunnel, into which the road plunges, will 
all be beautiful things. 

There is nothing in machinery, there is nothing in 
embankments and railways and iron bridges and engin- 
eering devices to oblige them to be ugly. Ugliness is 
the measure of imperfection ; a thing of human making 
is for the most part ugly in proportion to the poverty 
of its constructive thought, to the failure of its pro- 
ducer fully to grasp the purpose of its being. Every- 
thing to which men continue to give thought and atten- 
tion, which they make and remake in the same direc- 
tion, and with a continuing desire to do as well as they 
can, grows beautiful inevitably. Things made by man- 
kind under modern conditions are ugly, primarily be- 



ii 4 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

cause our social organisation is ugly, because we live 
in an atmosphere of snatch and uncertainty, and do 
everything in an underbred strenuous manner. This 
is the misfortune of machinery, and not its fault. Art, 
like some beautiful plant, lives on its atmosphere, and 
when the atmosphere is good, it will grow everywhere, 
and when it is bad nowhere. If we smashed and buried 
every machine, every furnace, every factory in the 
world, and without any further change set ourselves to 
home industries, hand labour, spade husbandry, sheep- 
folding and pig minding, we should still do things in 
the same haste, and achieve nothing but dirtiness, 
inconvenience, bad air, and another gaunt and gawky 
reflection of our intellectual and moral disorder. We 
should mend nothing. 

But in Utopia a man who designs a tram road will 
be a cultivated man, an artist craftsman ; he will strive, 
as a good writer, or a painter strives, to achieve the 
simplicity of perfection. He will make his girders and 
rails and parts as gracious as that first engineer, Nature, 
has made the stems of her plants and the joints and 
gestures of her animals. To esteem him a sort of anti- 
artist, to count every man who makes things with his 
unaided thumbs an artist, and every man who uses 
machinery as a brute, is merely a passing phase of 
human stupidity. This tram road beside us will be 
a triumph of design. The idea will be so unfamiliar 
to us that for a time it will not occur to us that it is 
a system of beautiful objects at all. We shall admire 
its ingenious adaptation to the need of a district that 






UTOPIAN ECONOMICS. 115 

is buried half the year in snow, the hard bed below, 
curved and guttered to do its own clearing, the great 
arched sleeper masses, raising the rails a good two 
yards above the ground, the easy, simple standards and 
insulators. Then it will creep in upon our minds, 
" But, by Jove ! This is designed ! " 

Indeed the whole thing will be designed. 

Later on, perhaps, we may find students in an art 
school working in competition to design an electric 
tram, students who know something of modern metal- 
lurgy, and something of electrical engineering, and we 
shall find people as keenly critical of a signal box or 

an iron bridge as they are on earth of ! Heavens ! 

what are they critical about on earth ? 

The quality and condition of a dress tie ! 

We should make some unpatriotic comparisons with 
our own planet, no doubt. 



CHAPTER THE FOURTH 

THE VOICE OF NATURE 



"T)RESENTLY we recognise the fellow of the earthly 
JL Devil's Bridge, still intAct as a footway, spanning 
the gorge, and old memories turn us off the road down 
the steep ruin of an ancient mule track towards it. It 
is our first reminder that Utopia too must have a his- 
tory. We cross it and find the Reuss, for all that it 
has already lit and warmed and ventilated and cleaned 
several thousands of houses in the dale above, and for 
all that it drives those easy trams in the gallery over- 
head, is yet capable of as fine a cascade as ever it flung 
on earth. So we come to a rocky path, wild as one 
could wish, and descend, discoursing how good and fair 
an ordered world may be, but with a certain unformu- 
lated qualification in our minds about those thumb 
marks we have left behind. 

" Do you recall the Zermatt valley ? " says my friend, 
" and how on earth it reeks and stinks with smoke ? " 

" People make that an argument for obstructing 
change, instead of helping it forward ! " 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 117 

And here perforce an episode intrudes. We are in- 
vaded by a talkative person. 

He overtakes us and begins talking forthwith in a 
fluty, but not unamiable, tenor. He is a great talker, 
this man, and a fairly respectable gesticulator, and to 
him it is we make our first ineffectual tentatives at 
explaining who indeed we are ; but his flow of talk 
washes that all away again. He has a face of that 
rubicund, knobby type I have heard an indignant 
mineralogist speak of as botryoidal, and about it waves 
a quantity of disorderly blond hair. He is dressed in 
leather doublet and knee breeches, and he wears over 
these a streaming woollen cloak of faded crimson that 
give him a fine dramatic outline as he comes down 
towards us over the rocks. His feet, which are large 
and handsome, but bright pink with the keen morning 
air, are bare, except for sandals of leather. (It was the 
only time that we saw anyone in Utopia with bare 
feet.) He salutes us with a scroll-like waving of his 
stick, and falls in with our slower paces. 

" Climbers, I presume ? " he says, " and you scorn 
these trams of theirs ? I like you. So do I ! Why 
a man should consent to be dealt with as a bale of goods 
holding an indistinctive ticket when God gave him legs 
and a face passes my understanding." 

As he speaks, his staff indicates the great mechanical 
road that runs across the gorge and high overhead 
through a gallery in the rock, follows it along until it 
turns the corner, picks it up as a viaduct far below, 
traces it until it plunges into an arcade through a jutting 



n8 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

crag, and there dismisses it with a spiral whirl. " No ! " 
he says. 

He seems sent by Providence, for just now we had 
been discussing how we should broach our remarkable 
situation to these Utopians before our money is spent. 

Our eyes meet, and I gather from the botanist that 
I am to open our case. 

I do my best. 

" You came from the other side of space ! " says the 
man in the crimson cloak, interrupting me. " Precisely ! 
I like that it's exactly my note ! So do I ! And you 
find this world strange ! Exactly my case ! We are 
brothers ! We shall be in sympathy. I am amazed, I 
have been amazed as long as I can remember, and I 
shall die, most certainly, in a state of incredulous amaze- 
ment, at this remarkable world. Eh ? . . . You found 
yourselves suddenly upon a mountain top ! Fortunate 
men ! " He chuckled. " For my part I found myself 
in the still stranger position of infant to two parents of 
the most intractable dispositions ! " 

" The fact remains," I protest. 

" A position, I can assure you, demanding Tact of 
an altogether superhuman quality ! " 

We desist for a space from the attempt to explain 
our remarkable selves, and for the rest of the time this 
picturesque and exceptional Utopian takes the talk 
entirely under his control . . . 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. ng 



2 

An agreeable person, though a little distracting, ht 
was, and he talked, we recall, of many things. He 
impressed us, we found afterwards, as a poseur beyond 
question, a conscious Ishmaelite in the world of wit, 
and in some subtly inexplicable way as a most con- 
summate ass. He talked first of the excellent and 
commodious trams that came from over the passes, and 
ran down the long valley towards middle Switzerland, 
and of all the growth of pleasant homes and chalets 
amidst the heights that made the opening gorge so 
different from its earthly parallel, with a fine disrespect. 
" But they are beautiful," I protested. " They are 
graciously proportioned, they are placed in well-chosen 
positions ; they give no offence to the eye." 

" What da we know of the beauty they replace ? 
They are a mere rash. Why should we men play the 
part of bacteria upon the face of our Mother ? " 

" All life is that ! " 

" No ! not natural life, not the plants and the gentle 
creatures that live their wild shy lives in forest and 
jungle. That is a part of her. That is the natural 
bloom of her complexion. But these houses and tram- 
ways and things, all made from ore and stuff torn from 

her veins ! You can't better my image of the rash. 

It's a morbid breaking out ! I'd give it all for one 
what is it ? free and natural chamois." 

" You live at times in a house ? " I asksd. 



120 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

He ignored my question. For him, untroubled Nature 
was the best, he said, and, with a glance at his feet, the 
most beautiful. He professed himself a Nazarite, and 
shook back his Teutonic poet's shock of hair. So he came 
to himself, and for the rest of our walk he kept to him- 
self as the thread of his discourse, and went over him- 
self from top to toe, and strung thereon all topics under 
the sun by way of illustrating his splendours. But 
especially his foil was the relative folly, the unnatural- 
ness and want of logic in his fellow men. He held 
strong views about the extreme simplicity of every- 
thing, only that men, in their muddle-headedness, had 
confounded it all. " Hence, for example, these trams ! 
They are always running up and down as though they 
were looking for the lost simplicity of nature. ' We 
dropped it here ! ' He earned a living, we gathered, 
" some considerable way above the minimum wage," 
which threw a chance light on the labour problem 
by perforating records for automatic musical machines 
no doubt of the Pianotist and Pianola kind and he 
spent all the leisure he could gain in going to and fro 
in the earth lecturing on " The Need of a Return to 
Nature," and on " Simple Foods and Simple Ways." 
He did it for the love of it. It was very clear to us 
he had an inordinate impulse to lecture, and esteemed 
us fair game. He had been lecturing on these topics 
in Italy, and he was now going back through the 
mountains to lecture in Saxony, lecturing on the 
way, to perforate a lot more records, lecturing the 
while, and so start out lecturing again. He was 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 121 

undisguisedly glad to have us to lecture to by the 
way. 

He called our attention to his costume at an early 
stage. It was the embodiment of his ideal of Nature- 
clothing, and it had been made especially for him at 
very great cost. " Simply because naturalness has fled 
the earth, and has to be sought now, and washed out 
from your crushed complexities like gold." 

" I should have thought," said I, " that any clothing 
whatever was something of a slight upon the natural 
man." 

" Not at all," said he, " not at all ! You forget his 
natural vanity ! " 

He was particularly severe on our artificial hoofs, as 1 
he called our boots, and our hats or hair destructors. 
" Man is the real King of Beasts and should wear a 
mane. The lion only wears it by consent and in cap- 
tivity." He tossed his head. 

Subsequently while we lunched and he waited for 
the specific natural dishes he ordered they taxed 
the culinary resources of the inn to the utmost he 
broached a comprehensive generalisation. " The animal 
kingdom and the vegetable kingdom are easily dis- 
tinguished, and for the life of me I see no reason for 
confusing them. It is, I hold, a sin against Nature. 
I keep them distinct in my mind and I keep them 
distinct in my person. No animal substance inside, no 
vegetable wjtliQut ; what could be simpler or more 
logical ? Nothing upon me but leather and allwool 
garments, within, cereals, fruit, nuts, herbs, and the 



122 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

like. Classification order man's function. He is here 
to observe and accentuate Nature's simplicity. These 
people " he swept an arm that tried not too person- 
ally to include us " are filled and covered with con- 
fusion." 

He ate great quantities of grapes and finished with 
a cigarette. He demanded and drank a great horn of 
unfermented grape juice, and it seemed to suit him well. 

We three sat about the board it was in an agree- 
able little arbour on a hill hard by the place where 
Wassen stands on earth, and it looked down the valley 
to the Uri Rothstock, and ever and again we sought to 
turn his undeniable gift of exposition to the elucidation 
of our own difficulties. 

But we seemed to get little, his style was so elusive. 
Afterwards, indeed, we found much information and 
many persuasions had soaked into us, but at the time 
it seemed to us he told us nothing. He indicated things 
by dots and dashes, instead of by good hard assertive 
lines. He would not pause to see how little we knew. 
Sometimes his wit rose so high that he would lose sight 
of it himself, and then he would pause, purse his lips 
as if he whistled, and then till the bird came back to 
the lure, fill his void mouth with grapes. He talked 
of the relations of the sexes, and love a passion he 
held in great contempt as being in its essence complex 
and disingenuous and afterwards we found we had 
learnt much of what the marriage laws of Utopia allow 
and forbid. 

" A simple natural freedom," he said, waving a 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 123 

grape in an illustrative manner, and so we gathered 
the Modern Utopia did not at any rate go to that. 
He spoke, too, of the regulation of unions, of people 
who were not allowed to have children, of complicated 
rules and interventions. " Man," he said, " had ceased 
to be a natural product ! " 

We tried to check him with questions at this most 
illuminating point, but he drove on like a torrent, and 
carried his topic out of sight. The world, he held, 
was overmanaged, and that was the root of all evil. 
He talked of the overmanagement of the world, and 
among other things of the laws that would not let a 
poor simple idiot, a " natural," go at large. And so 
we had our first glimpse of what Utopia did with the 
feeble and insane. " We make all these distinctions 
between man and man, we exalt this and favour that, 
and degrade and seclude that ; we make birth artificial, 
life artificial, death artificial." 

" You say We," said I, with the first glimmering of 
a new idea, " but you don't participate ? " 

" Not I ! I'm not one of your samurai, your volun- 
tary noblemen who have taken the world in hand. I 
might be, of course, but I'm not." 

" Samurai ! " I repeated, " voluntary noblemen ! " 
and for the moment could not frame a question. 

He whirled on to an attack on science, that stirred 
the botanist to controversy. He denounced with great 
bitterness all specialists whatever, and particularly 
doctors and engineers. 

" Voluntary noblemen ! " he said, " voluntary Gods 



124 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

I fancy they think themselves," and I was left behind 
for a space in the perplexed examination of this paren- 
thesis, while he and the botanist who is sedulous to 
keep his digestion up to date with all the newest de- 
vices argued about the good of medicine men. 

" The natural human constitution," said the blond- 
haired man, " is perfectly simple, with one simple 
condition you must leave it to Nature. But if you 
mix up things so distinctly and essentially separated 
as the animal and vegetable kingdoms for example, 
and ram that in fqr it to digest, what can you expect ? 

" 111 health ! There isn't such a thing in the course 
of Nature. But you shelter from Nature in houses, you 
protect yourselves by clothes that are useful instead 
of being ornamental, you wash with such abstersive 
chemicals as soap for example and above all you 
consult doctors." He approved himself with a chuckle. 
" Have you ever found anyone seriously ill without 
doctors and medicine about ? Never ! You say a lot 
of people would die without shelter and medical attend- 
ance ! No doubt but a natural death. A natural 
death is better than an artificial life, surely ? That's 
to be frank with you the very citadel of my position." 

That led him, and rather promptly, before the botanist 
could rally to reply, to a great tirade against the laws 
that forbade " sleeping out." He denounced them with 
great vigour, and alleged that for his own part he broke 
that law whenever he could, found some corner of moss, 
shaded from an excess of dew, and there sat up to sleep. 
He slept, he said, always in a sitting position, with his 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 125 

head on his wrists, and his wrists on his knees the 
simple natural position for sleep in man. . . . He said 
it would be far better if all the world slept out, and 
all the houses were pulled down. 

You will understand, perhaps, the subdued irrita- 
tion I felt, as I sat and listened to the botanist en- 
tangling himself in the logical net of this wild nonsense. 
It impressed me as being irrelevant. When one comes 
to a Utopia one expects a Cicerone, one expects a 
person as precise and insistent and instructive as an 
American advertisement the advertisement of one of 
those land agents, for example, who print their own 
engaging photographs to instil confidence and begin, 
" You want to buy real estate." One expects to find all 
Utopians absolutely convinced of the perfection of their 
Utopia, and incapable of receiving a hint against its 
order. And here was this purveyor of absurdities ! 

And yet now that I come to think it over, is not this 
too one of the necessary differences between a Modern 
Utopia and those finite compact settlements of the 
older school of dreamers ? It is not to be a unanimous 
world any more, it is to have all and more of the mental 
contrariety we find in the world of the real ; it is no 
longer to be perfectly explicable, it is just our own 
vast mysterious welter, with some of the blackest 
shadows gone, with a clearer illumination, and a more 
conscious and intelligent will. Irrelevance is not irrele- 
vant to such a scheme, and our blond-haired friend is 
exactly just where he ought to be here. 

Still 



126 A MODERN UTOPIA. 



3 

I ceased to listen to the argumentation of ray botanist 
with this apostle of Nature. The botanist, in his 
scientific way, was, I believe, defending the learned 
professions. (He thinks and argues like drawing on 
squared paper.) It struck me as transiently remark- 
able that a man who could not be induced to forget 
himself and his personal troubles on coming into a 
whole new world, who could waste our first evening in 
Utopia upon a paltry egotistical love story, should 
presently become quite heated and impersonal in the 
discussion of scientific professionalism. He was ab- 
sorbed. I can't attempt to explain these vivid spots and 
blind spots in the imaginations of sane men ; there they 
are ! 

" You say," said the botanist, with a prevalent 
index finger, and the resolute deliberation of a big 
siege gun being lugged into action over rough ground 
by a number of inexperienced men, " you prefer a 
natural death to an artificial life. But what is your 
definition (stress) of artificial ? . . ." 

And after lunch too ! I ceased to listen, flicked the 
end of my cigarette ash over the green trellis of the 
arbour, stretched my legs with a fine restfulness, leant 
back, and gave my mind to the fields and houses that 
lay adown the valley. 

What I saw interwove with fragmentary things our 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 127 

garrulous friend had said, and with the trend of my 
own speculations. . . . 

The high road, with its tramways and its avenues 
on either side, ran in a bold curve, and with one great 
loop of descent, down the opposite side of the valley, 
and below crossed again on a beautiful viaduct, and 
dipped into an arcade in the side of the Bristenstock. 
Our inn stood out boldly, high above the level this 
took. The houses clustered in their collegiate groups 
over by the high road, and near the subordinate way 
that ran almost vertically below us and past us and up 
towards the valley of the Meien Reuss. There were 
one or two Utopians cutting and packing the flowery 
mountain grass in the carefully levelled and irrigated 
meadows by means of swift, light machines that ran on 
things like feet and seemed to devour the herbage, and 
there were many children and a woman or so, going to 
and fro among the houses near at hand. I guessed a 
central building towards the high road must be the 
school from which these children were coming. I noted 
the health and cleanliness of these young heirs of 
Utopia as they passed below. 

The pervading quality of the whole scene was a 
sane order, the deliberate solution of problems, a pro- 
gressive intention steadily achieving itself, and the 
aspect that particularly occupied me was the incon- 
gruity of this with our blond-haired friend. 

On the one hand here was a state of affairs that 
implied a power of will, an organising and controlling 
force, the co-operation of a great number of vigorous 



128 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

people to establish and sustain its progress, and on the 
other this creature of pose and vanity, with his restless 
wit, his perpetual giggle at his own cleverness, his 
manifest incapacity for comprehensive co-operation. 

Now, had I come upon a hopeless incompatibility ? 
Was this the reductio ad absurdum of my vision, and 
must it even as I sat there fade, dissolve, and vanish 
before my eyes ? 

There was no denying our blond friend. If this 
Utopia is indeed to parallel our earth, man for man 
and I see no other reasonable choice to that there 
must be this sort of person and kindred sorts of persons 
in great abundance. The desire and gift to see life 
whole is not the lot of the great majority of men, the 
service of truth is the privilege of the elect, and these 
clever fools who choke the avenues of the world of 
thought, who stick at no inconsistency, who oppose, 
obstruct, confuse, will find only the freer scope amidst 
Utopian freedoms. 

(They argued on, these two, as I worried my brains 
with riddles. It was like a fight between a cock sparrow 
and a tortoise ; they both went on in their own way, 
regardless of each other's proceedings. The encounter 
had an air of being extremely lively, and the moments 
of contact were few. " But you mistake my point," 
the blond man was saying, disordering his hair which 
nad become unruffled in the preoccupation of dispute 
with a hasty movement of his hand, " you don't 
appreciate the position I take up.") 

" Ugh ! " said I privately, and lighted another cigar- 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 129 

ette and went away into my own thoughts with 
that. 

The position he takes up ! That's the way of your 
intellectual fool, the Universe over. He takes up a 
position, and he's going to be the most brilliant, de- 
lightful, engaging and invincible of gay delicious crea- 
tures defending that position you can possibly imagine. 
And even when the case is not so bad as that, there 
still remains the quality. We " take up our positions," 
silly little contentious creatures that we are, we will 
not see the right in one another, we will not patiently 
state and restate, and honestly accommodate and plan, 
and so we remain at sixes and sevens. We've all a 
touch of Gladstone in us, and try to the last moment 
to deny we have made a turn. And so our poor broken- 
springed world jolts athwart its trackless destiny. Try 
to win into line with some fellow weakling, and see the 
little host of suspicions, aggressions, misrepresentations, 
your approach will stir like summer flies on a high 
road the way he will try to score a point and claim 
you as a convert to what he has always said, his fear 
lest the point should be scored to you. 

It is not only such gross and palpable cases as our 
blond and tenoring friend. I could find the thing 
negligible were it only that. But when one sees the 
same thread woven into men who are leaders, men who 
sway vast multitudes, who are indeed great and powerful 
men } when one sees how unfair they can be, how un- 
teachable, the great blind areas in their eyes also, their 
want of generosity, then one's doubts gather like mists 

5 



I 3 o A MODERN UTOPIA. 

across this Utopian valley, its vistas pale, its people 
become unsubstantial phantoms, all its order and its 
happiness dim and recede. . . . 

If we are to have any Utopia at all, we must have 
a clear common purpose, and a great and steadfast 
movement of will to override all these incurably ego- 
tistical dissentients. Something is needed wide and 
deep enough to float the worst of egotisms away. The 
world is not to be made right by acclamation and in 
a day, and then for ever more trusted to run alone. 
It is manifest this Utopia could not come about by 
chance and anarchy, but by co-ordinated effort and a 
community of design, and to tell of just land laws and 
wise government, a wisely balanced economic system, 
and wise social arrangements without telling how it 
was brought about, and how it is sustained against 
the vanity and self-indulgence, the moody fluctuations 
and uncertain imaginations, the heat and aptitude for 
partisanship that lurk, even when they do not flourish, 
in the texture of every man alive, is to build a palace 
without either door or staircase. 

I had not this in mind when I began. 

Somewhere in the Modern Utopia there must be 
adequate men, men the very antithesis of our friend, 
capable of self-devotion, of intentional courage, of 
honest thought, and steady endeavour. There must 
be a literature to embody their cor.imon idea, of which 
this Modern Utopia is merely the material form ; there 
must be some organisation, however slight, to keep 
them in touch one with the other. 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 131 

Who will these men be ? Will they be a caste ? a 
race ? an organisation in the nature of a Church ? . . . 
And there came into my mind the words of our ac- 
quaintance, that he was not one of these " voluntary 
noblemen." 

At first that phrase struck me as being merely queer, 
and then I began to realise certain possibilities that 
were wrapped up in it. 

The animus of our chance friend, at any rate, went 
to suggest that here was his antithesis. Evidently 
what he is not, will be the class to contain what is 
needed here. Evidently. 



4 

I was recalled from my meditations by the hand of 
the blond-haired man upon my arm. 

I looked up to discover the botanist had gone into 
the inn. 

The blond-haired man was for a moment almost 
stripped of pose. 

" I say," he said. " Weren't you listening to me ? " 

" No," I said bluntly. 

His surprise was manifest. But by an effort he 
recalled wha't he had meant to say. 

" Your friend," he said, " has been telling me, in 
spite of my sustained interruptions, a most incredible 
story," 



132 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

I wondered how the botanist managed to get it in. 
" About that woman ? " I said. 

" About a man and a woman who hate each other 
and can't get away from each other." 

" I know," I said. 

" It sounds absurd." 

" It is." 

"Why can't they get away? What is there to 
keep them together ? It's ridiculous. I " 

" Quite." 

" He would tell it to me." 

" It's his way." 

" He interrupted me. And there's no point in it. 
Is he " he hesitated, " mad ? " 

" There's a whole world of people mad with him," 
I answered after a pause. 

The perplexed expression of the blond-haired man 
intensified. It is vain to deny that he enlarged the 
scope of his inquiry, visibly if not verbally. " Dear 
me ! " he said, and took up something he had 
nearly forgotten. " And you found yourselves sud- 
denly on a mountain side ? . . . I thought you were 
joking." 

I turned round upon him with a sudden access of 
earnestness. At least I meant my manner to be earnest, 
but to him it may have seemed wild. 

" You," I said, " are an original sort of man. Do 
not be alarmed. Perhaps you will understand. . . . 
We were not joking." 

"But, my dear fellow ! " 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 133 

" I mean it ! We come from an inferior world ! 
Like this, but out of order." 

" No world could be more out of order " 

" You play at that and have your fun. But there's 
no limit to the extent to which a world of men may 
get out of gear. In our world " 

He nodded, but his eye had ceased to be friendly. 

" Men die of starvation ; people die by the hundred 
thousand needlessly and painfully ; men and women are 
lashed together to make hell for each other ; children 
are born abominably, and reared in cruelty and folly > 
there is a thing called war, a horror of blood and vile- 
ness. The whole thing seems to me at times a cruel 
and wasteful wilderness of muddle. You in this decent 
world have no means of understanding " 

" No ? " he said, and would have begun, but I went 
en too quickly. 

" No ! When I see you dandering through this 
excellent and hopeful world, objecting, obstructing, 
and breaking the law, displaying your wit on science 
and order, on the men who toil so ingloriously to swell 
and use the knowledge that is salvation, this salvation 
for which our poor world cries to heaven " 

" You don't mean to say," he said, " that you really 
come from some other world where things are different 
and worse ? " 

" I do." 

" And you want to talk to me about it instead of 
listening to me ? " 

" Yes." 



134 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" Oh, nonsense ! " he said abruptly. " You can't 
do it really. I can assure you this present world 
touches the nadir of imbecility. You and your friend, 
with his love for the lady who's so mysteriously tied 
you're romancing ! People could not possibly do such 
things. It's if you'll excuse me ridiculous. He began 
he would begin. A most tiresome story simply 
bore me down. We'd been talking very agreeably 
before that, or rather I had, about the absurdity of 
marriage laws, the interference with a free and natural 
life, and so on, and suddenly he burst like a dam. No ! " 
He paused. " It's really impossible. You behave per- 
fectly well for a time, and then you begin to interrupt. 
. . . And such a childish story, too ! " 

He spun round upon his chair, got up, glanced at 
me over his shoulder, and walked out of the arbour. 
He stepped aside hastily to avoid too close an approach 
to the returning botanist. " Impossible," I heard him 
say. He was evidently deeply aggrieved by us. I saw 
him presently a little way off in the garden, talking to 
the landlord of our inn, and looking towards us as he 
talked they both looked towards us and after that, 
without the ceremony of a farewell, he disappeared, 
and we saw him no more. We waited for him a little 
while, and then I expounded the situation to the 
botanist. . . . 

" We are going to have a very considerable amount 
of trouble explaining ourselves," I said in conclusion. 
" We are here by an act of the imagination, and that is 
just one of those metaphysical operations that are so 



THE VOICE OF NATURE. 135 

difficult to make credible. We are, by the standard 
of bearing and clothing I remark about us, unattractive 
in dress and deportment. We have nothing to produce 
to explain our presence here, no bit of a flying machine 
or a space travelling sphere or any of the apparatus 
customary on these occasions. We have no means 
beyond a dwindling amount of small change out of a 
gold coin, upon which I suppose in ethics and the law 
some native Utopian had a better claim. We may 
already have got ourselves into trouble with the author- 
ities w^th that confounded number of yours ! " 

" You did one too ! " 

" All the more bother, perhaps, when the thing is 
brought home to us. There's no need for recrimina- 
tions. The thing of moment is that we find ourselves * 
in the position not to put too fine a point upon it 
of tramps in this admirable world. The question of 
all others of importance to us at present is what do 
they do with their tramps ? Because sooner or later, 
and the balance of probability seems to incline to 
sooner, whatever they do with their tramps that they 
will do with us." 

" Unless we can get some work." 

" Exactly unless we can get some work." 

" Get work ! " 

The botanist leant forward on his arms and looked 
cut of the arbour with an expression of despondent 
discovery. " I say," he remarked ; " this is a strange 
world quite strange and new. I'm only beginning to 
realise iust what it means for us. The mountain* there 



136 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

are the same, the old Bristenstock and all the rest of it ; 
but* these houses, you know, and that roadwa} r , and the 
costumes, and that machine that is licking up the grass 
there only. ..." 

He sought expression. " Who knows what will come 
in sight round the bend of the valley there ? Who 
knows what may happen to us anywhere ? We don't 
know who rules over us even ... we don't know 
that ! " 

" No," I echoed. " we don't know tliat." 



CHAPTER THE FIFTH 

FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA 
I 

THE old Utopias save for the breeding schemes of 
Plato and Campanella ignored that reproductive 
competition among individualities which is the substance 
of life, and dealt essentially with its incidentals. The end- 
less variety of men, their endless gradation of quality, 
over which the hand of selection plays, and to which 
we owe the unmanageable complication of real life, is 
tacitly set aside. The real world is a vast disorder of 
accidents and incalculable forces in which men survive 
or fail. A Modern Utopia, unlike its predecessors, dare 
not pretend to change the last condition ; it may order 
and humanise the conflict, but men must still survive 
or fail. 

Most Utopias present themselves as going concerns, 
as happiness in being ; they make it an essential con- 
dition that a happy land can have no history, and all 
the citizens one is permitted to see are well looking and 
upright and mentally and morally in tune. But we 
are under the dominion of a logic that obliges us to 



138 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

take over the actual population of the world with only 
such moral and mental and physical improvements as 
lie within their inherent possibilities, and it is our busi- 
ness to ask what Utopia will do with its congenital 
invalids, its idiots and madmen, its drunkards and men 
of vicious mind, its cruel and furtive souls, its stupid 
people, too stupid to be of use to the community, its 
lumpish, unteachable and unimaginative people ? And 
what will it do with the man who is " poor " all round, 
the rather spiritless, rather incompetent low-grade man 
who on earth sits in the den of the sweater, tramps the 
streets under the banner of the unemployed, or trembles 
in another man's cast-off clothing, and with an in- 
finity of hat-touching on the verge of rural employ- 
ment ? 

These people will have to be in the descendant phase, 
the species must be engaged in eliminating them ; there 
iv no escape from that, and conversely the people of 
exceptional quality must be ascendant. The better sort 
of people, so far as they can be distinguished, must 
have the fullest freedom of public service, and the 
fullest opportunity of parentage. And it must be open 
to every man to approve himself worthy of ascendency. 

The way of Nature in this process is to kill the weaker 
and the sillier, to crush them, to starve them, to over- 
whelm them, using the stronger and more cunning as 
her weapon. But man is the unnatural animal, the 
rebel child of Nature, and more and more does he turn 
himself against the harsh and fitful hand that reared 
him. He sees with a growing resentment the multitude 






FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 139 

of suffering ineffectual lives over which his species 
tramples in its ascent. In the Modern Utopia he will 
have set himself to change the ancient law. _No longer 
jvill it.be thqt failure must suffer and perish lest their 
breed increase, but the breed of^ failure must not in- 
crease, lest they suffer and perish, and the race with 
them. 

Now we need not argue here to prove that the re- 
sources of the world and the energy of mankind, were 
they organised sanely, are amply sufficient to supply 
every material need of every living human being. And 
if it can be so contrived that every human being shall 
live in a state of reasonable physical and mental com- 
fort, without the reproduction of inferior types, there is 
no reason whatever why that should not be secured. 
But there must be a competition in life of some sort 
to determine who are to be pushed to the edge, and 
who are to prevail and multiply. Whatever we do, 
man will remain a competitive creature, and though 
moral and intellectual training may vary and enlarge 
his conception of success and fortify him with refine- 
ments and consolations, no Utopia will ever save him 
completely from the emotional drama of struggle, from 
exultations and humiliations, from pride and prostra- 
tion and shame. He lives in success and failure just 
as inevitably as he lives in space and time. 

But we may do much to make the margin of failure 
endurable. On earth, for all the extravagance of charity, 
the struggle for the mass of men at the bottom resolves 
itself into a struggle, and often a very foul and ugly 



140 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

straggle, for food, shelter, and clothing. Deaths out- 
right from exposure and starvation are now perhaps 
uncommon, but for the multitude there are only miser- 
able houses, uncomfortable clothes, and bad and in- 
sufficient food ; fractional starvation and exposure, that 
is to say. A Utopia planned upon modern lines will 
certainly have put an end to that. It will insist upon 
every citizen being properly housed, well nourished, and 
in good health, reasonably clean and clothed healthily, 
and upon that insistence its labour laws will be founded. 
In a phrasing that will be familiar to everyone inter- 
ested in social reform, it will maintain a standard of 
life. Any house, unless it be a public monument, that 
does not come up to its rising standard of healthiness 
and convenience, the Utopian State will incontinently 
pull down, and pile the material and charge the owner 
' for the labour ; any house unduly crowded or dirty, it 
must in some effectual manner, directly or indirectly, 
confiscate and clear and clean. And any citizen inde- 
cently dressed, or ragged and dirty, or publicly un- 
healthy, or sleeping abroad homeless, or in any way 
neglected or derelict, must come under its care. It will 
find him work if he can and will work, it will take him 
to it, it will register him and lend him the money where- 
with to lead a comely life until work can be found or 
made for him, and it will give him credit and shelter 
him and strengthen him if he is ill. In default of private 
enterprises it will provide inns for him and food, and 
it will by itself acting as the reserve employer main- 
tain a minimum wage which will cover the cost of a 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 141 

decent life. The State will stand at the back of the 
economic struggle as the reserve employer of labour. 
This most excellent idea does, as a matter of fact, under- 
lie the British institution of the workhouse, but it is 
jumbled up with the relief of old age and infirmity, it 
is administered parochially and on the supposition that 
all population is static and localised whereas every year 
it becomes more migratory ; it is administered without 
any regard to the rising standards of comfort and self- 
respect in a progressive civilisation, and it is admin- 
istered grudgingly. The thing that is done is done as 
unwilling charity by administrators who are often, in 
the rural districts at least, competing for low-priced 
labour, and who regard want of employment as a crime. 
But if it were possible for any citizen in need of money 
to resort to a place of public employment as a right, 
and there work for a week or month without degrada- 
tion upon certain minimum terms, it seems fairly cer- 
tain that no one would work, except as the victim of 
some quite exceptional and temporary accident, for less. 
The work publicly provided would have to be toil- 
some, but not cruel or incapacitating. A choice of occu- 
pations would need to be afforded, occupations adapted 
to different types of training and capacity, with some 
residual employment of a purely laborious and mechan- 
ical sort for those who were incapable of doing the 
things that required intelligence. Necessarily this em- 
ployment by the State would be a relief of economic 
pressure, but it would not be considered a charity done 
to the individual, but a public service. It need not 



142 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

pay, any more than the police need pay, but it could 
probably be done at a small margin of loss. There is 
a number of durable things bound finally to be useful 
thd$ could be made and stored whenever the tide of 
more highly paid employment ebbed and labour sank 
to its minimum, bricks, iron from inferior ores, shaped 
and preserved timber, pins, nails, plain fabrics of cotton 
and linen, paper, sheet glass, artificial fuel, and so on ; 
new roads could be made and public buildings recon- 
structed, inconveniences of all sorts removed, until under 
the stirnjilus j)f accumulating material, accumulating in- 
vestments or other circumstances, the tide of private 
enterprise flowed again. 

The State would provide these things for its citizen 
as though it was his right to require them ; he would 
receive as a shareholder in the common enterprise and 
not with any insult of charity. But on the other hand 
it will require that the citizen who renders the minimum 
of service for these concessions shall not become a parent 
until he is established in work at a rate above the mini- 
mum, and free of any debt he may have incurred. The 
State will never press for its debt, nor put a limit to its 
accumulation so long as a man or woman remains child- 
less ; it will not even grudge them temporary spells of 
good fortune when they may lift their earnings above 
the minimum wage. It will pension the age of every- 
one who cares to take a pension, and it will maintain 
special guest homes for the very old to which they may 
come as paying guests, spending their pensions there. 
By such obvious devices it will achieve the maximum 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 143 

elimination of its feeble and spiritless folk in every 
generation with the minimum of suffering and public 
disorder. 



2 

But the mildly incompetent, the spiritless and dull, 
the poorer sort who are ill, do not exhaust our Utopian 
problem. There remain idiots and lunatics, there 
remain perverse and incompetent persons, there are 
people of weak character who become drunkards, drug 
takers, and the like. Then there are persons tainted 
with certain foul and transmissible diseases. All these 
people spoil the world for others. They may become 
parents, and with most of them there is manifestly 
nothing to be done but to seclude them from the great 
body of the population. You must resort to a kind 
of social surgery. You cannot have social freedom in 
your public ways, your children cannot speak to whom 
they will, your girls and gentle women cannot go abroad 
while some sorts of people go free. And there are vio- 
lent people, and those who will not respect the property 
of others, thieves and cheats, they, too, so soon as their 
nature is confirmed, must pass out of the free life of 
our ordered world. So soon as there can be no doubt 
of the disease or baseness of the individual, so soon as 
the insanity or other disease is assured, or the crime 
repeated a third time, or the drunkenness or misde- 
meanour past its seventh occasion (let us say), so 



144 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

soon must he or she pass out of the common ways of 
men. 

The dreadfulness of all such proposals as this lies in 
the possibility of their execution falling into the hands 
of hard, dull, and cruel administrators. But in the case 
of a Utopia one assumes the best possible government, 
a government as merciful and deliberate as it is powerful 
and decisive. You must not too hastily imagine these 
things being done as they would be done on earth at 
present by a number of zealous half-educated people 
in a state of panic at a quite' imaginary " Rapid Multi- 
plication of the Unfit." 

No doubt for first offenders, and for all offenders 
under five-and-twenty, the Modern Utopia will attempt 
cautionary and remedial treatment. There will be dis- 
ciplinary schools and colleges for the young, fair and 
happy places, but with less confidence and more re- 
straint than the schools and colleges of the ordinary 
world. In remote and solitary regions these enclosures 
will lie, they will be fenced in and forbidden to the 
common run of men, and there, remote from all temp- 
tation, the defective citizen will be schooled. There will 
be no masking of the lesson ; " which do you value 
most, the wide world of humanity, or this evil trend in 
you ? " From that discipline at last the prisoners will 
return. 

But the others ; what would a saner world do with 
them ? 

Our world is still vindictive, but the all-reaching 
State of Utopia will have the strength that begets 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 145 

mercy. Quietly the outcast will go from among his 
fellow men. There will be no drumming of him out of 
the ranks, no tearing off of epaulettes, no smiting in 
the face. The thing must be just public enough to 
obviate secret tyrannies, and that is all. 

There would be no killing, no lethal chambers. No 
doubt_Utoj)iawill^ kill all deformed and monstrous and 
evilly_diseasecl births, but for the rest, the State will 
iiolcf itself accountable for their being. There is no 
justice in Nature perhaps, but the idea of justice must 
be sacred in any good society. Lives that statesman- 
ship has permitted, errors it has not foreseen and edu- 
cated against, must not be punished by death. If the 
State does not keep faith, no one will keep faith. Crime 
and bad lives are the measure of a State's failure, all 
crime in the end is the crime of the community. Even 
for murder Utopia will not, I think, kill. 

I doubt even if there will be jails. No men are quite 
wise enough, good enough and cheap enough to staff 
jails as a jail ought to be staffed. Perhaps islands will 
be chosen, islands lying apart from the highways of the 
sea, and to these the State will send its exiles, most of 
them thanking Heaven, no doubt, to be quit of a world 
of prigs. The State will, of course, secure itself against 
any children from these people, that is the primary 
object in their seclusion, and perhaps it may even be 
necessary to make these island prisons a system of 
island monasteries and island nunneries. Upon that I 
am not competent to speak, but if I may believe the 
literature of the subject unhappily a not very well 



146 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

criticised literature it is not necessary to enforce this 
separation.* 

About such islands patrol boats will go, there will 
be no freedoms of boat -building, and it may be neces- 
sary to have armed guards at the creeks and quays. 
Beyond that the State will give these segregated failures 
just as full a liberty as they can have. If it interferes 
any further it will be simply to police the islands against 
the organisation of serious cruelty, to maintain the free- 
dom of any of the detained who wish it to transfer 
themselves to other islands, and so to keep a check 
upon tyranny. The insane, of course, will demand care 
and control, but there is no reason why the islands of 
the hopeless drunkard, for example, should not each 
have a virtual autonomy, have at the most a Resident 
and a guard. I believe that a community of drunkards 
might be capable of organising even its own bad habit to 
the pitch of tolerable existence. I do not see why such 
an island should not build and order for itself and manu- 
facture and trade. " Your ways are not our ways," 
the World State will say ; " but here is freedom and a 
company of kindred souls. Elect your jolly rulers, brew 
if you will, and distil ; here are vine cuttings and barley 
fields ; do as it pleases you to do. We will take care 
of the knives, but for the rest deal yourselves with 
God ! " 

And you see the big convict steamship standing in 
to the Island of Incurable Cheats. The crew are respect- 
fully at their quarters, ready to lend a hand overboard, 

* See for example Dr. W. A. Chappie's The Fertility of the Unfit, 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 147 

but wide awake, and the captain is hospitably on the 
bridge to bid his guests good-bye and keep an eye on 
the movables. The new citizens for this particular 
Alsatia, each no doubt with his personal belongings 
securely packed and at hand, crowd the deck and study 
the nearing coast. Bright, keen faces would be there, and 
we, were we by any chance to find ourselves beside the 
captain, might recognise the double of this great earthly 
magnate or that, Petticoat Lane and Park Lane cheek 
by jowl. The landing part of the jetty is clear of people, 
only a government man or so stands there to receive 
the boat and prevent a rush, but beyond the gates a 
number of engagingly smart-looking individuals loiter 
speculatively. One figures a remarkable building labelled 
Custom House, an interesting fiscal revival this popula- 
tion has made, and beyond, crowding up the hill, the 
painted walls of a number of comfortable inns clamour 
loudly. One or two inhabitants in reduced circum- 
stances would act as hotel touts, there are several hotel 
omnibuses and a Bureau de Change, certainly a Bureau 
de Change. And a small house with a large board, 
aimed point-blank seaward, declares itself a Gratis In- 
formation Office, and next to it rises the graceful dome 
of a small Casino. Beyond, great hoardings proclaim 
the advantages of many island specialities, .a hustling 
commerce, and the opening of a Public Lottery. There 
is a large cheap-looking barrack, the school of Com- 
mercial Science for gentlemen of inadequate training. . . . 
Altogether a very go-ahead looking little port it 
would be, and though this disembarkation would have 



148 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

none of the flow of hilarious good fellowship that would 
throw a halo of genial noise about the Islands of Drink, 
it is doubtful if the new arrivals would feel anything 
very tragic in the moment. Here at last was scope for 
adventure after their hearts. 

This sounds more fantastic than it is. But what else 
is there to do, unless you kill ? You must seclude, but 
why should you torment ? All modern prisons are places 
of torture by restraint, and the habitual criminal plays 
the part of a damaged mouse at the mercy of the cat 
of our law. He has his little painful run and back he 
comes again to a state more horrible even than desti- 
tution. There are no Alsatias left in the world. For 
my own part I can think of no crime, unless it is reck- 
less begetting or the wilful transmission of contagious 
disease, for which the bleak terrors, the solitudes and 
ignominies of the modern prison do not seem outrage- 
ously cruel. If you want to go so far as that, then kill. 
Why, once you are rid of them, should you pester 
criminals to respect an uncongenial standard of con- 
duct ? Into such islands of exile as this a modern 
Utopia will have to purge itself. There is no alternative 
that I can contrive. 



3 

Will a Utopian be free to be idle ? 
Work has to be done, every day humanity is sus- 
tained by its collective effort, and without a constant 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 149 

recurrence of effort in the single man as in the race 
as a whole, there is neither health nor happiness. The 
permanent idleness of a human being is not only burthen- 
some to the world, but his own secure misery. But un- 
profitable occupation is also intended by idleness, and 
it may be considered whether that freedom also will be 
open to the Utopian. Conceivably it will, like privacy, 
locomotion, and almost all the freedoms of life, and on 
the same terms if he possess the money to pay for it. 

That last condition may produce a shock in minds 
accustomed to the proposition that money is the root 
of all evil, and to the idea that Utopia necessarily im- 
plies something rather oaken and hand-made and primi- 
tive in all these relations. Of course, money is not the 
root of any evil in the world ; the root of all evil in 
the world, and the root of all good too, is the Will to 
Live, and money becomes harmful only when by bad 
laws and bad economic organisation it is more easily 
attained by bad men than good. It is as reasonable 
to say food is the root of all disease, because so many 
people suffer from excessive and unwise eating. The 
sane economic ideal is to make the possession of money 
the clear indication of public serviceableness, and the 
more nearly that ideal is attained, the smaller is the 
justification of poverty and the less the hardship of 
being poor. In barbaric and disorderly countries it is 
almost honourable to be indigent and unquestionably 
virtuous to give to a beggar, and even in the more or 
less civilised societies of earth, so many children come 
into life hopelessly handicapped, {hat austerity to the 



150 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

poor is regarded as the meanest of mean virtues. But 
in Utopia everyone will have had an education and a 
certain minimum of nutrition and training ; everyone 
will be insured against ill-health and accidents ; there 
will be the most efficient organisation for balancing the 
pressure of employment and the presence of disengaged 
labour, and so to be moneyless will be clear evidence 
of unworthiness. In Utopia, no one will dream of giv- 
ing to a casual beggar, and no one will dream of begging. 

There will need to be, in the place of the British 
casual wards, simple but comfortable inns with a low 
tariff controlled to a certain extent no doubt, and 
even in some cases maintained, by the State. This 
tariff will have such a definite relation to the minimum 
permissible wage, that a man who has incurred no 
liabilities through marriage or the like relationship, 
will be able to live in comfort and decency upon that 
minimum wage, pay his small insurance premium 
against disease, death, disablement, or ripening years, 
and have a margin for clothing and other personal 
expenses. But he will get neither shelter nor food, 
except at the price of his freedom, unless he can pro- 
duce money. 

But suppose a man without money in a district where 
employment is not to be found for him ; suppose the 
amount of employment to have diminished in the dis- 
trict with such suddenness as to have stranded him 
there. Or suppose he has quarrelled with the only 
possible employer, or that he does not like his par- 
ticular work. The*n no doubt the Utopian State, 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 151 

which wants everyone to be just as happy as the future 
welfare of the race permits, will come to his assistance. 
One imagines him resorting to a neat and business-like 
post-office, and stating his case to a civil and intelligent 
official. In any sane State the economic conditions of 
every quarter of the earth will be watched as constantly 
as its meteorological phases, and a daily map of the 
country within a radius of three or four hundred miles 
showing all the places where labour is needed will hang 
upon the post-office wall. To this his attention will 
be directed. The man out of work will decide to try 
his luck in this place or that, and the public servant, 
the official will make a note of his name, verify his 
identity the freedom of Utopia will not be incom- 
patible with the universal registration of thumb-marks 
and issue passes for travel and coupons for any neces- 
sary inn accommodation on his way to the chosen des- 
tination. There he will seek a new employer. 

Such a free change of locality once or twice a year 
from a region of restricted employment to a region of 
labour shortage will be among the general privileges 
of the Utopian citizen. 

But suppose that in no district in the world is there 
work within the capacity of this particular man ? 

Before we suppose that, we must take into considera- 
tion the general assumption one is permitted to make 
in all Utopian speculations. All Utopians will be reason- 
ably well educated upon Utopian lines ; there will be 
no illiterates unless they are unteachable imbeciles, no 
rule-of-thumb toilers as inadaptable as trained beasts. 



152 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

The Utopian worker will be as versatile as any well- 
educated man is on earth to-day, and no Trade Union 
will impose a limit to his activities. The world will be 
his Union. If the work he does best and likes best is 
not to be found, there is still the work he likes second 
best. Lacking his proper employment, he will turn to 
some kindred trade. 

But even with that adaptability, it may be that 
sometimes he will not find work. Such a disproportion 
between the work to be done and the people to do it 
may arise as to present a surplus of labour everywhere. 
This disproportion may be due to two causes : to an 
increase of population without a corresponding increase 
of enterprises, or to a diminution of employment through- 
out the world due to the completion of great enterprises, 
to economies achieved, or to the operation of new and 
more efficient labour-saving appliances. Through either 
cause, a World State may find itself doing well except 
for an excess of citizens of mediocre and lower quality. 

But the first cause may be anticipated by wise 
marriage laws. . . . The full discussion of these laws 
will come later, but here one may insist that Utopia 
will control the increase of its population. Without 
the determination and ability to limit that increase as 
well as to stimulate it whenever it is necessary, no 
Utopia is possible. That was clearly demonstrated by 
Malthus for all time. 

The second cause is not so easily anticipated, but 
then, though its immediate result in glutting the labour 
market is similar, its final consequences are entirely 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 153 

different from those of the first. The whole trend of 
a scientific mechanical civilisation is continually to re- 
place labour by machinery and to increase it in its 
effectiveness by organisation, and so quite independently 
of any increase in population labour must either fall 
in value until it can compete against and check the 
cheapening process, or if that is prevented, as it will 
be in Utopia, by a minimum wage, come out of employ- 
ment. There is no apparent limit to this process. 
But a surplus of efficient labour at the minimum wage 
is exactly the condition that should stimulate new 
enterprises, and that in a State saturated with science 
and prolific in invention will stimulate new enterprises. 
An increasing surplus of available labour without an 
absolute increase of population, an increasing surplus 
of labour due to increasing economy and not to pro- 
liferation, and which, therefore, does not press on and 
disarrange the food supply, is surely the ideal condition 
for a progressive civilisation. I am inclined to think 
that, since labour will be regarded as a delocalised and 
fluid force, it will be the World State and not the big 
municipalities ruling the force areas that will be the 
reserve employer of labour. Very probably it will be 
convenient for the State to hand over the surplus labour 
for municipal purposes, but that is another question. 
All over the world the labour exchanges will be report- 
ing the fluctuating pressure of economic demand and 
transferring workers from this region of excess to that 
of scarcity ; and whenever the excess is universal, the 
World State failing an adequate development of 






154 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

private enterprise will either reduce the working day 
and so absorb the excess, or set on foot some perma- 
nent special works of its own, paying the minimum 
wage and allowing them to progress just as slowly or 
just as rapidly as the ebb and flow of labour dictated. 
But with sane marriage and birth laws there is no reason 
to suppose such calls upon the resources and initiative 
of the world more than temporary and exceptional 
occasions. 



4 

The existence of our blond bare-footed friend was 
evidence enough that in a modern Utopia a man will 
be free to be just as idle or uselessly busy as it pleases 
him, after he has earned the minimum wage. He must 
do that, of course, to pay for his keep, to pay his assur- 
ance tax against ill-health or old age, and any charge 
or debt paternity may have brought upon him. The 
World State of the modern Utopist is no state of moral 
compulsions. If, for example, under the restricted 
Utopian scheme of inheritance, a man inherited suffi- 
cient money to release him from the need to toil, h 
would be free to go where he pleased and do what he 
liked. A certain proportion of men at ease is good for 
the world ; work as a moral obligation is the morality 
of slaves, and so long as no one is overworked there is 
no need to worry because some few are underworked. 
Utopia does not exist as a solace for envy. From 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 155 

leisure, in a good moral and intellectual atmosphere, 
come experiments, come philosophy and the new de- 
partures. 

In any modern Utopia there must be many leisurely 
people. We are all too obsessed in the real world by 
the strenuous ideal, by the idea that the vehement 
incessant fool is the only righteous man. Nothing 
done in a hurry, nothing done under strain, is really 
well done. A State where all are working hard, where 
none go to and fro, easily and freely, loses touch with 
the purpose of freedom. 

But inherited independence will be the rarest and 
least permanent of Utopian facts, for the most part 
that wider freedom will have to be earned, and the 
inducements to men and women to raise their persona] 
value far above the minimum wage will be very great 
indeed. Thereby will come privacies, more space in 
which to live, liberty to go everywhere and do no end 
of things, the power and freedom to initiate interesting 
enterprises and assist and co-operate with interesting 
people, and indeed all the best things of life. The 
modern Utopia will give a universal security indeed, 
and exercise the minimum of compulsions to toil, but 
it will offer some acutely desirable prizes. The aim of 
all these devices, the minimum wage, the standard of 
life, provision for all the feeble and unemployed and 
so forth, is not to rob life of incentives but to change 
their nature, to make life not less energetic, but less 
; panic-stricken and violent and base, to shift the in- 
cidence of the struggle for existence from our lower 






156 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

to our higher emotions, so to anticipate and neutralise 
the motives of the cowardly and bestial, that the am- 
bitious and energetic imagination which is man's finest 
quality may become the incentive and determining 
lactor in survival. 



5 

After we have paid for our lunch in the little inn 
that corresponds to Wassen, the botanist and I would 
no doubt spend the rest of the forenoon in the discus- 
sion of various aspects and possibilities of Utopian 
labour laws. We should examine our remaining change, 
copper coins of an appearance ornamental rather than 
reassuring, and we should decide that after what we 
had gathered from the man with the blond hair, it 
would, on the whole, be advisable to come to the point 
with the labour question forthwith. At last we should 
draw the deep breath of resolution and arise and ask 
for the Public Office. We should know by this time 
that the labour bureau sheltered with the post-office 
and other public services in one building. 

The public office of Utopia would of course contain 
a few surprises for two men from terrestrial England. 
You imagine us entering, the botanist lagging a little 
behind me, and my first attempts to be offhand and 
commonplace in a demand for work. 

The office is in charge of a quick-eyed little woman 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 157 

of six and thirty perhaps, and she regards us with a 
certain keenness of scrutiny. 

" Where are your papers ? " she asks. 
I think for a moment of the documents in my pocket, 
y passport chequered with visas and addressed in my 
commendation and in the name of her late Majesty by 
We, Robert Arthur Talbot Gascoigne Cecil, Marquess of 
Salisbury, Earl of Salisbury, Viscount Cranborne, Baron 
'ecil, and so forth, to all whom it may concern, my 
'arte d'Identiti (useful on minor occasions) of the Touring 
lub de France, my green ticket to the Reading Room 
f the British Museum, and my Lettre d' Indication 
om the London and County Bank. A foolish humour 
rompts me to unfold all these, hand them to her and 
ake the consequences, but I resist. 
" Lost," I say, briefly. 

" Both lost ? " she asks, looking at my friend. 
" Both," I answer. 
" How ? " 

I astonish myself by the readiness of my answer. 
" I fell down a snow slope and they came out of my 
ocket." 

" And exactly the same thing happened to both of 
ou ? " 

" No. He'd given me his to put with my own." 
he raised her eyebrows. " His pocket is defective," 
add, a little hastily. 

Her manners are too Utopian for her to follow that 
ip. She seems to reflect on procedure. 
" What are your numbers ? " she asks, abruptly. 



I 5 8 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

A vision of that confounded visitors' book at the 
inn above comes into my mind. " Let me see," I say, 
and pat my forehead and reflect, refraining from the 
official eye before me. " Let me see." 

" What is yours ? " she asks the botanist. 

" A. B.," he says, slowly, " little a, nine four seven, I 
think " 

" Don't you know ? " 

" Not exactly," says the botanist, very agreeably. 
" No." 

" Do you mean to say neither of you know your 
own numbers ? " says the little post-mistress, with a 
rising note. 

" Yes," I say, with an engaging smile and trying to 
keep up a good social tone. " It's queer, isn't it ? 
We've both forgotten." 

" You're joking," she suggests. 

" Well," I temporise. 

" I suppose you've got your thumbs ? " 

"The fact is " I say and hesitate. "We've 

got our thumbs, of course." 

" Then I shall have to send a thumb-print down to the 
office and get your number from that. But are you sure 
you haven't your papers or numbers ? It's very queer." 

We admit rather sheepishly that it's queer, and 
question one another silently. 

She turns thoughtfully for the thumb-marking slab, 
and as she does so, a man enters the office. At the 
sight of him she asks with a note of relief, " What am 
I to do, sir, here ? " 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 159 

He looks from her to us gravely, and his eye lights 
to curiosity at our dress. " What is the matter, 
madam ? " he asks, in a courteous voice. 

She explains. 

So far the impression we have had of our Utopia is 
one of a quite unearthly sanity, of good management 
and comprehensive design in every material thing, and 
it has seemed to us a little incongruous that all the 
Utopians we have talked to, our host of last night, the 
post-mistress and our garrulous tramp, have been of 
the most commonplace type. But suddenly there looks 
out from this man's pose and regard a different quality, 
a quality altogether nearer that of the beautiful tram- 
way and of the gracious order of the mountain houses. 
He is a well-built man of perhaps five and thirty, with 
the easy movement that comes with perfect physical 
condition, his face is clean shaven and shows the firm 
mouth of a disciplined man, and his grey eyes are 
clear and steady. His legs are clad in some woven 
stuff deep-red in colour, and over this he wears a 
white shirt fitting pretty closely, and with a woven 
purple hem. His general effect reminds me somehow 
of the Knights Templars. On his head is a cap of 
thin leather and still thinner steel, and with the 
vestiges of ear-guards rather like an attenuated ver- 
sion of the caps that were worn by Cromwell's Iron- 
sides. 

He looks at us and we interpolate a word or so as 
she explains and feel a good deal of embarrassment at 
the foolish position we have made for ourselves. I 



ibo A MODERN UTOPIA. 

determine to cut my way out of this entanglement 
before it complicates itself further. 

"The fact is " I say. 

" Yes ? " he says, with a faint smile. 

" We've perhaps been disingenuous. Our position 
is so entirely exceptional, so difficult to explain " 

" What have you been doing ? " 

" No," I say, with decision ; " it can't be explained 
like that." 

He looks down at his feet. " Go on," he says. 

I try to give the thing a quiet, matter-of-fact air. 
" You see," I say, in the tone one adopts for really 
lucid explanations, " we come from another world. 
Consequently, whatever thumb-mark registration or 
numbering you have in this planet doesn't apply to us, 
and we don't know our numbers because we haven't got 
any. We are really, you know, explorers, strangers " 

" But what world do you mean ? " 

" It's a different planet a long way away. Prac- 
tically at an infinite distance." 

He looks up in my face with the patient expression 
of a man who listens to nonsense. 

" I know it sounds impossible," I say, " but here is 
the simple fact we appear in your world. We appeared 
suddenly upon the neck of Lucendro* the Passo 
Lucendro yesterday afternoon, and I dy you to dis- 
cover the faintest trace of us before that time. Down 
we marched into the San Gotthard road and here we 

are ! That's our fact. And as for papers ! Where 

in your world have you seen papers like this ? " 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 161 

I produce my pocket-book, extract my passport, and 
present it to him. 

His expression has changed. He takes the docu- 
ment and examines it, turns it over, looks at me, and 
smiles that faint smile of his again. 

" Have some more," I say, and proffer the card of 
the T.C.R 

I follow up that blow with my green British Museum 
ticket, as tattered as a flag in a knight's chapel. 

" You'll get found out," he says, with my documents 
in his hand. " You've got your thumbs. You'll be 
measured. They'll refer to the central registers, and 
there you'll be ! " 

" That's just it," I say, " we shan't be." 

He reflects. " It's a queer sort of joke for you two 
men to play," he decides, handing me back my docu- 
ments. 

" It's no joke at all," I say, replacing them in my 
pocket-book. 

The post-mistress intervenes. " What would you 
advise me to do ? " 

" No money ? " he asks. 

" No." 

He makes some suggestions. " Frankly," he says, 
" I think ypu have escaped from some island. How 
you got so ar as here I can't imagine, or what you 
think you'll do. . . . But anyhow, there's the stuff for 
your thumbs." 

He points to the thumb-marking apparatus and turns 

to attend to his own business. 

6 



162 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

Presently we emerge from the office in a state be- 
tween discomfiture and amusement, each with a tram- 
way ticket for Lucerne in his hand and with sufficient 
money to pay our expenses until the morrow. We are 
to go to Lucerne because there there is a demand for 
comparatively unskilled labour in carving wood, which 
seems to us a sort of work within our range and a sort 
that will not compel our separation. 




6 

The old Utopias are sessile organisations ; the new 
must square itself to the needs of a migratory popula- 
tion, to an endless coming and going, to a people as 
fluid and tidal as the sea. It does not enter into the 
scheme of earthly statesmanship, but indeed all local 
establishments, all definitions of place, are even now 
melting under our eyes. Presently all the world will 
be awash with anonymous stranger men. 

Now the simple laws of custom, the homely methods 
of identification that served in the little communities 
of the past when everyone knew everyone, fail in the 
face of this liquefaction. If the modern Utopia is 
indeed to be a world of responsible citizens, it must 
have devised some scheme by which every person in 
the world can be promptly and certainly recognised, 
and by which anyone missing can be traced and found. 

This is by no means an impossible demand. The 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 163 

total population of the world is, on the most generous 
estimate, not more than 1,500,000,000, and the effectual 
indexing of this number of people, the record of their 
movement hither and thither, the entry of various 
material facts, such as marriage, parentage, criminal 
convictions and the like, the entry of the new-born and 
the elimination of the dead, colossal task though it 
would be, is still not so great as to be immeasurably 
beyond comparison with the work of the post-offices in 
the world of to-day, or the cataloguing of such libraries 
as that of the British Museum, or such collections as 
that of the insects in Cromwell Road. Such an index 
could be housed quite comfortably on one side of 
Northumberland Avenue, foi- example. It is only a 
reasonable tribute to the distinctive lucidity of the 
French mind to suppose the central index housed in a 
vast series of buildings at or near Paris. The index 
would be classified primarily by some unchanging 
physical characteristic, such as we are told the thumb- 
mark and finger-mark afford, and to these would be 
added any other physical traits that were of material 
value. The classification of thumb-marks and of in- 
alterable physical characteristics goes on steadily, and 
there is every reason for assuming it possible that each 
human being could be given a distinct formula, a 
number or " scientific name," under which he or she 
could be docketed.* About the buildings in which 

* It is quite possible that the actual thumb-mark may play only 
a small part in the work of identification, but it is an obvious con- 
venience to our thread of story to assume that it is the one sufficient 
feature. 



164 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

this great main index would be gathered, would be a 
system of other indices with cross references to the 
main one, arranged under names, under professional 
qualifications, under diseases, crimes and the like. 

These index cards might conceivably be transparent 
and so contrived as to give a photographic copy promptly 
whenever it was needed, and they could have an at- 
tachment into which would slip a ticket bearing the 
name of the locality in which the individual was last 
reported. A little army of attendants would be at 
work upon this index day and night. From sub-stations 
constantly engaged in checking back thumb-marks and 
numbers, an incessant stream of information would 
come, of births, of deaths, of arrivals at inns, of appli- 
cations to post-offices for letters, of tickets taken for 
long journeys, of criminal convictions, marriages, ap- 
plications for public doles and the like. A filter of 
offices would sort the stream, and all day and all night 
for ever a swarm of clerks would go to and fro correct- 
ing this central register, and photographing copies of 
its entries for transmission to the subordinate local 
stations, in response to their inquiries. So the inven- 
tory of the State would watch its every man and the 
wide world write its history as the fabric of its destiny 
flowed on. At last, when the citizen died, would come 
the last entry of all, his age and the cause of his death 
and the date and place of his cremation, and his card 
would be taken out and passed on to the universal 
pedigree, to a place of greater quiet, to the ever-grow- 
ing galleries of the records of the dead. 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 165 

Such a record is inevitable if a Modern Utopia is to 
be achieved. 

Yet at this, too, our blond-haired friend would no 
doubt rebel. One of the many things to which some 
will make claim as a right, is that of going unrecog- 
nised and secret whither one will. But that, so far as 
one's fellow wayfarers were concerned, would still be 
possible. Only the State would share the secret of 
one's little concealment. To the eighteenth-century 
Liberal, to the old - fashioned nineteenth - century 
Liberal, that is to say to all professed Liberals, brought 
up to be against the Government on principle, this 
organised clairvoyance will be the most hateful of 
dreams. Perhaps, too, the Individualist would see it 
in that light. But these are only the mental habits 
acquired in an evil time. The old Liberalism assumed 
bad government, the more powerful the government 
the worse it was, just as it assumed the natural right- 
eousness of the free individual. Darkness and secrecy 
were, indeed, the natural refuges of liberty when every 
government had in it the near possibility of tyranny, 
and the Englishman or American looked at the papers 
of a Russian or a German as one might look at the 
chains of a slave. You imagine that father of the 
old Liberalism, Rousseau, slinking off from his offspring 
at the door of the Foundling Hospital, and you can 
understand what a crime against natural virtue this 
quiet eye of the State would have seemed to him. But 
suppose we do not assume that government is necessarily 
bad, and the individual necessarily good and the 



166 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

hypothesis upon which we are working practically 
abolishes either alternative then we alter the case 
altogether. The government of a modern Utopia will 
be no perfection of intentions ignorantly ruling the 
world. . . .* 

Such is the eye of the State that is now slowly be- 
ginning to apprehend our existence as two queer and 
inexplicable parties disturbing the fine order of its 
field of vision, the eye that will presently be focussing 
itself upon us with a growing astonishment and interro- 
gation. " Who in the name of Galton and Bertillon," 
one fancies Utopia exclaiming, " are you ? " 

I perceive I shall cut a queer figure in that focus. 
I shall affect a certain spurious ease of carriage no 
doubt. " The fact is, I shall begin. . . . 



7 
And now see how an initial hypothesis may pursue 

* In the typical modern State of our own world, with its population 
of many millions, and its extreme facility of movement, undistinguished 
men who adopt an alias can make themselves untraceable with the 
utmost ease. The temptation of the opportunities thus offered has 
developed a new type of criminality, the Deeming or Grossman type, 
base men who subsist and feed their heavy imaginations in the wooing, 
bet-ayal, ill-treatment, and sometimes even the murder of undis- 
tinguished women. This is a large, a growing, and, what is gravest, 
a prulific class, fostered by the practical anonymity of the commoa 
man. It is only the murderers who attract much public attention, but 
the supply of low-class prostitutes is also largely due to these free 
adventures of the base. It is one of the bye products of State Liberal- 
.md at present it is very probably drawing ahead in the race 
against the development of police organisation. 



FAILURE IX A MODERN UTOPIA. 167 

and overtake its maker. Our thumb-marks have been 
taken, they have travelled by pneumatic tube to the 
central office of the municipality hard by Lucerne, and 
have gone on thence to the headquarters of the index 
at Paris. There, after a rough preliminary classification, 
I imagine them photographed on glass, and flung by 
means of a lantern in colossal images upon a screen, 
all finely squared, and the careful experts marking and 
measuring their several convolutions. And then off 
goes a brisk clerk to the long galleries of the index 
building. 

I have told them they will find no sign of us, but 
you see him going from gallery to gallery, from bay to 
bay, from drawer to drawer, and from card to card. 
" Here he is ! " he mutters to himself, and he whips out 
a card and reads. " But that is impossible ! " he 
says. . . . 

You figure us returning after a day or so of such 
Utopian experiences as I must presently describe, to 
the central office in Lucerne, even as we have been 
told to do. 

I make my way to the desk of the man who has dealt 
with us before. " Well ? " I say, cheerfully, " have you 
heard ? " 

His expression dashes me a little. " We've heard," 
he says, and adds, "it's very peculiar." 

" I told you you wouldn't find out about us," I say, 
triumphantly. 

"But we have," he says; "but that makes your 
freak none the less remarkable." 



168 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" You've heard ! You know who we are ! Well tell 
us ! We had an idea, but we're beginning to doubt." 
" You," says the official, addressing the botanist, 

" are ! " 

And he breathes his name. Then he turns to me 

and gives me mine. 

For a moment I am dumbfounded. Then I think 
of the entries we made at the inn in the Urserenthal, 
and then in a flash I have the truth. I rap the desk 
smartly with my finger-tips and shake my index-fmger 
in my friend's face. 

" By Jove ! " I say in English. " They've got our 
doubles ! " 

The botanist snaps his fingers. " Of course ! I didn't 
think of that." 

" Do you mind," I say to this official, " telling us 
some more about ourselves ? " 

" I can't think why you keep it up," he remarks, 
and then almost wearily tells me the facts about my 
Utopian self. They are a little difficult to understand. 
He says I am one of the samurai, which sounds Japanese, 
" but you will be degraded," he says, with a gesture 
almost of despair. He describes my position in this 
world in phrases that convey very little. 

" The queer thing," he remarks, " is that you were 
in Norway only three days ago." 

" I am there still. At least . I'm sorry to be 

so much trouble to you, but do you mind following up 
that last clue and inquiring if the person to whom the 
thumb-mark really belongs isn't in Norway still ? " 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 169 

The idea needs explanation. He says something in- 
comprehensible about a pilgrimage. " Sooner or later," 
I say, " you will have to believe there are two of us 
with the same thumb-mark. I won't trouble you with 
any apparent nonsense about other planets and so forth 
again. Here I am. If I was in Norway a few days 
ago, you ought to be able to trace my journey hither. 
And my friend ? " 

" He was in India." The official is beginning to look 
perplexed. 

" It seems to me," I say, " that the difficulties in 
this case are only just beginning. How did I get from 
Norway hither ? Does my friend look like hopping 
from India to the Saint Gotthard at one hop ? The 
situation is a little more difficult than that 

" But here ! " says the official, and waves what are 
no doubt photographic copies of the index cards. 

" But we are not those individuals ! " 

" You are those individuals." 

" You will see," I say. 

He dabs his finger argumentatively upon the thumb- 
marks. " I see now," he says. 

" There is a mistake," I maintain, " an unprece- 
dented mistake. There's the difficulty. If you inquire 
you will find it begin to unravel. What reason is there 
for us to remain casual workmen here, when you allege 
we are men of position in the world, if there isn't some- 
thing wrong ? We shall stick to this wood-carving work 
you have found us here, and meanwhile I think you ought 
to inquire again. That's how the thing shapes to me." 

6a 



I 7 o A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" Your case will certainly have to be considered 
further," he says, with the faintest of threatening notes 
in his tone. " But at the same time " hand out to 
those copies from the index again " there you are, 
you know 1 " 



8 

When my botanist and I have talked over and ex- 
hausted every possibility of our immediate position, we 
should turn, I think, to more general questions. 

I should tell him the thing that was becoming more 
and more apparent in my own mind. Here, I should 
say, is a world, obviously on the face of it well organ- 
ised. Compared with our world, it is like a well-oiled 
engine beside a scrap-heap. It has even got this con- 
founded visual organ swivelling about in the most alert 
and lively fashion. But that's by the way. . . . You 
have only to look at all these houses below. (We should 
be sitting on a seat on the Gutsch and looking down on 
the Lucerne of Utopia, a Lucerne that would, I insist, 
quite arbitrarily, still keep the Wasserthurm and the 
Kapellbrucke.) You have only to mark the beauty, 
the simple cleanliness and balance of this world, you 
nave only to see the free carriage, the unaffected gracious- 
ness of even the common people, to understand how 
fine and complete the arrangements of this world must 
be. How are they made so ? We of the twentieth 
century are not going to accept the sweetish, faintly 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 171 

nasty slops of Rousseauism that so gratified our great- 
great-grandparents in the eighteenth. We know that 
order and justice do not come by Nature " if only the 
policeman would go away." These things mean inten- 
tion, will, carried to a scale that our poor vacillating, 
hot and cold earth has never known. What I am really 
seeing more and more clearly is the will beneath this 
visible Utopia. Convenient houses, admirable engin- 
eering that is no offence amidst natural beauties, beau- 
tiful bodies, and a universally gracious carriage, these 
are only the outward and visible signs of an inward and 
spiritual grace. Such an order means discipline. It 
means triumph over the petty egotisms and vanities 
that keep men on our earth apart ; it means devotion 
and a nobler hope ; it cannot exist without a gigantic 
process of inquiry, trial, forethought and patience in an 
atmosphere of mutual trust and concession. Such a world 
as this Utopia is not made by the chance occasional co- 
operations of self-indulgent men, by autocratic rulers or 
by the bawling wisdom of the democratic leader. And 
an unrestricted competition for gain, an enlightened 
selfishness, that too fails us. ... 

I have compared the system of indexing humanity 
we have come upon to an eye, an eye so sensitive and 
alert that two strangers cannot appear anywhere upon 
the planet without discovery. Now an eye does not 
see without a brain, an eye does not turn round and 
look without a will and purpose. A Utopia that deals 
only with appliances and arrangements is a dream of 
superficialities ; the essential problem here, the body 



I 7 2 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

within these garments, is a moral and an intellectual 
problem. Behind all this material order, these perfected 
communications, perfected public services and economic 
organisations, there must be men and women willing 
these things. There must be a considerable number 
and a succession of these men and women of will. No 
single person, no transitory group of people, could 
order and sustain this vast complexity. They must 
have a collective if not a common width of aim, and 
that involves a spoken or written literature, a living 
literature to sustain the harmony of their general ac- 
tivity. In some way they must have put the more 
immediate objects of desire into a secondary place, and 
that means renunciation. They must be effectual in 
action and persistent in will, and that means discipline. 
But in the modern world in which progress advances 
without limits, it will be evident that whatever common 
creed or formula they have must be of the simplest 
sort ; that whatever organisation they have must be as 
mobile and flexible as a thing alive. All this follows 
inevitably from the general propositions of our Utopian 
dream. When we made those, we bound ourselves 
helplessly to come to this. . . . 

The botanist would nod an abstracted assent. 

I should cease to talk. I should direct my mind to 
the confused mass of memories three days in Utopia 
will have given us. Besides the personalities with 
whom we have come into actual contact, our various 
hosts, our foreman and work-fellows, the blond man, 
the public officials, and so on, there will be a great 



FAILURE IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 173 

multitude of other impressions. There will be many 
bright snapshots of little children, for example, of girls 
and women and men, seen in shops and offices and 
streets, on quays, at windows and by the wayside, 
people riding hither and thither and walking to and 
fro. A very human crowd it has seemed to me. But 
among them were there any who might be thought of as 
having a wider interest than the others, who seemed in 
any way detached from the rest by a purpose that 
passed beyond the seen ? 

Then suddenly I recall that clean-shaven man who 
talked with us for a little while in the public office at 
Wassen, the man who reminded me of my boyish con- 
ception of a Knight Templar, and with him come momen- 
tary impressions of other lithe and serious-looking 
people dressed after the same manner, words and phrases 
we have read in such scraps of Utopian reading as have 
come our way, and expressions that fell from the loose 
mouth of the man with the blond hair. . . 



CHAPTER THE SIXTH 

WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA 
I 

BUT though I have come to a point where the prob- 
lem of a Utopia has resolved itself very simply into 
the problem of government and direction, I find I have 
not brought the botanist with me. Frankly he cannot 
think so steadily onward as I can. I feel to think, he 
thinks to feel. It is I and my kind that have the wider 
range, because we can be impersonal as well as personal, 
can escape ourselves. In general terms, at least, I 
understand him, but he does not understand me in any 
way at all. He thinks me an incomprehensible brute 
because his obsession is merely one of my incidental 
interests, and wherever my reasoning ceases to be 
explicit and full, the slightest ellipsis, the most transi- 
tory digression, he evades me and is back at himself 
again. He may have a personal liking for me, though 
I doubt it, but also he hates me pretty distinctly, be- 
cause of this bias he cannot understand. My philo- 
sophical insistence that things shall be reasonable and 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 175 

hang together, that what can be explained shall be 
explained, and that what can be done by calculation 
and certain methods shall not be left to chance, he 
loathes. He just wants adventurously to feel. He 
wants to feel the sunset, and he thinks that on the 
whole he would feel it better if he had not been taught 
the sun was about ninety-two million miles away. He 
wants to feel free and strong, and he would rather feel 
so than be so. He does not want to accomplish great 
things, but to have dazzling things occur to him. He 
does not know that there are feelings also up in the 
clear air of the philosophic mountains, in the long 
ascents of effort and design. He does not know that 
thought itself is only a finer sort of feeling than his 
good hock to the mixed gin, porter and treacle of his 
emotions, a perception of similitudes and oppositions 
that carries even thrills. And naturally he broods on 
the source of all his most copious feelings and emotions, 
women, and particularly upon the woman who has most 
made him feel. He forces me also to that. 

Our position is unfortunate for me. Our return to 
the Utopian equivalent of Lucerne revives in him all 
the melancholy distresses that so preoccupied him when 
first we were transferred to this better planet. One 
day, while we are still waiting there for the public office 
to decide about us, he broaches the matter. It is early 
evening, and we are walking beside the lake after our 
simple dinner. " About here," he says, " the quays 
would run and all those big hotels would be along here, 
looking out on the lake. It's so strange to have seen 



I 7 6 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

them so recently, and now not to see them at all. . . . 
\Vhcre have they gone ? " 

" Vanished by hypothesis." 

"What?" 

" Oh ! They're there still. It's we that have come 
hither." 

" Of course. I forgot. But still You know, 

there was an avenue of little trees along this quay with 
seats, and she was sitting looking out upon the lake. 
... I hadn't seen her for ten years." 

He looks about him still a little perplexed. " Now 
we are here," he says, " it seems as though that meeting 
and the talk we had must have been a dream." 

He falls musing. 

Presently he says : "I knew her at once. I saw 
her in profile. But, you know, I didn't speak to her 
directly. I walked past her seat and on for a little 
way, trying to control myself. . . . Then I turned back 
and sat down beside her, very quietly. She looked up 
at me. Everything came back everything. For a 
moment or so I felt I was going to cry. ... 

That seems to give him a sort of satisfaction even 
in the reminiscence. 

" We talked for a time just like casual acquaint- 
ances about the view and the weather, and things like 
that." 

He muses again. 

" In Utopia everything would have been different." 
I say. 
" I suppose it would." 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 177 

He goes on before I can say anything more. 

" Then, you know, there was a pause. I had a sort 
of intuition that the moment was coming. So I think 
had she. You may scoff, of course, at these intui- 
tions " 

I don't, as a matter of fact. Instead, I swear secretly. 
Always this sort of man keeps up the pretence of highly 
distinguished and remarkable mental processes, where- 
as have not I, in my own composition, the whole 
diapason of emotional fool ? Is not the suppression of 
these notes my perpetual effort, my undying despair ? 
And then, am I to be accused of poverty ? 

But to his story. 

" She said, quite abruptly, ' I am not happy,' and I 
told her, ' I knew that the instant I saw you.' Then, 
you know, she began to talk to me very quietly, very 
frankly, about everything. It was only afterwards I 
began to feel just what it meant, her talking to me like 
that." 

I cannot listen to this ! 

" Don't you understand," I cry, " that we are in 
Utopia. She may be bound unhappily upon earth and 
you may be bound, but not here. Here I think it will 
be different. Here the laws that control all these 
things will be humane and just. So that all you said 
and did, over there, does not signify here does not 
signify here ! " 

He looks up for a moment at my face, and then care- 
lessly at my wonderful new world. 

" Yes," he says, without interest, with something of 



178 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

the tone of an abstracted elder speaking to a child, " I 
say it will be all very fine here." And he lapses, 
thwarted from his confidences, into musing. 

There is something almost dignified in this with- 
drawal into himself. For a moment I entertain an 
illusion that really I am unworthy to hear the impal- 
pable inconclusiveness of what he said to her and of 
what she said to him. 

I am snubbed. I am also amazed to find myself 
snubbed. I become breathless with indignation. We 
\vnlk along side by side, but now profoundly estranged. 

I regard the fa$ade of the Utopian public offices of 
Lucerne I had meant to call his attention to some of 
the architectural features of these with a changed eye, 
with all the spirit gone out of my vision. I wish I had 
never brought this introspective carcass, this mental 
ingrate, with me. 

I incline to fatalistic submission. I suppose I had 
no power to leave 'him behind. ... I wonder and I 
wonder. The old Utopists never had to encumber 
themselves with this sort of man. 



2 

How would things be "different" in the Modern 
Utopia ? After all it is time we faced the riddle of the 

cms of marriage and motherhood. . . . 
The Modern Utopia is not only to be a sound and 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 179 

happy World State, but it is to be one progressing from 
good to better. But as Malthus * demonstrated for 
all time, a State whose population continues to increase 
in obedience to unchecked instinct, can progress only 
from bad to worse. From the view of human comfort 
and happiness, the increase of population that occurs 
at each advance in human security is the greatest evil 
of life. The way of Nature is for every species to in-j 
crease nearly to its possible maximum of numbers, andj 
then to improve through the pressure of that maximumj 
against its limiting conditions by the crushing and kill-j 
ing of all the feebler individuals. The way of Nature! 
has also been the way of humanity so far, and except 
when a temporary alleviation is obtained through an 
expansion of the general stock of sustenance by inven- 
tion or discovery, the amount of starvation and of the 
physical misery of privation in the world, must vary 
almost exactly with the excess of the actual birth-rate 
over that required to sustain population at a number 
compatible with a universal contentment. Neither has 
Nature evolved, nor has man so far put into operation, 
any device by which paying this price of progress, this 
misery of a multitude of starved and unsuccessful lives 
can be evaded. A mere indiscriminating restriction 
of the birth-rate an end practically attained in the 
homely, old-fashioned civilisation of China by female 
infanticide, involves not only the cessation of dis- 
tresses but stagnation, and the minor good of a sort of 
comfort and social stability is won at too great a sacri- 

* Essay on the Principles of Population. 



i8o A MODERN UTOPIA. 

lice. Progress depends essentially on competitive selec- 
tion, and that we may not escape. 

But ft is a conceivable and possible thing that this 
margin of futile struggling, pain and discomfort and 
death might be reduced to nearly nothing without 
checking physical and mental evolution, with indeed 
an acceleration of physical and mental evolution, by 
preventing the birth of those who would in the un- 
restricted interplay of natural forces be born to suffer 
and fail. The method of Nature " red in tooth and 
claw " is to degrade, thwart, torture, and kill the weak- 
est and least adapted members of every species in exist- 
ence in each generation, and so keep the specific average 
rising ; the ideal of a scientific civilisation is to prevent 
those weaklings being born. There is no other way of 
evading Nature's punishment of sorrow. The struggle 
for life among the beasts and uncivilised men means 
misery and death for the inferior individuals, misery 
and death in order that they may not increase and 
multiply ; in the civilised State it is now clearly pos- 
sible to make the conditions of life tolerable for every 
living creature, provided the inferiors can be prevented 
from increasing and multiplying. But this latter con- 
dition must be respected. Instead of competing to 
escape death and wretchedness, we may compete to give 
birth and we may heap every sort of consolation prize 
upon the losers in that competition. The modern State 
tends to qualify inheritance, to insist upon education 
and nurture for children, to come in more and more 
in the interests of the future between father and child. 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 181 

It is taking over the responsibility of the general wel- 
fare of the children more and more, and as it does so, 
its right to decide which children it will shelter becomes 
more and more reasonable. 

How far will such conditions be prescribed ? how 
far can they be prescribed in a Modern Utopia ? 

Let us set aside at once all nonsense of the sort one 
hears in certain quarters about the human stud farm.* 
State breeding of the population was a reasonable pro- 
posal for Plato to make, in view of the biological know- 
ledge of his time and the purely tentative nature of his 
metaphysics ; but from anyone in the days after Darwin, 
it is preposterous. Yet we have it given to us as the 
most brilliant of modern discoveries by a certain school 
of sociological writers, who seem totally unable to grasp 
the modification of meaning " species " and " indi- 
vidual " have undergone in the last fifty years. They 
do not seem capable of the suspicion that the boundaries 
of species have vanished, and that individuality now 
carries with it the quality of the unique ! To them 
individuals are still defective copies of a Platonic ideal 
of the species, and the purpose of breeding no more 
than an approximation to that perfection. Individuality 
is indeed a negligible difference to them, an impertinence, 
and the whole flow of modern biological ideas has washed 
over them in vain. 

But to the modern thinker individuality is the sig- 
nificant fact of life, and the idea of the State, which 
is necessarily concerned with the average and general, 

* See Mankind in the Making, Ch. II. 



i8a A MODERN UTOPIA. 

selecting individualities in order to pair them and im- 
prove the race, an absurdity. It is like fixing a crane 
on the plain in order to raise the hill tops. In the initi- 
ative of the individual above the average, lies the reality 
of the future, which the State, presenting the average, 
may subserve but cannot control. And the natural 
centre of the emotional life, the cardinal will, the supreme 
and significant expression of individuality, should lie 
in the selection of a partner for procreation. 

But compulsory pairing is one thing, and the main- 
tenance of general limiting conditions is another, and 
one well within the scope of State activity. The State 
is justified in saying, before you may add children to 
the community for the community to educate and in 
part to support, you must be above a certain minimum 
of personal efficiency, and this you must show by hold- 
ing a position of solvency and independence in the 
world ; you must be above a certain age, and a certain 
minimum of physical development, and free of any 
transmissible disease. You must not be a criminal 
unless you have expiated your offence. Failing these 
simple qualifications, if you and some person conspire 
and add to the population of the State, we will, for 
the sake of humanity, take over the innocent victim 
of your passions, but we shall insist that you are under 
a debt to the State of a peculiarly urgent sort, and one 
you will certainly pay, even if it is necessary to use 
.tint to get the payment out of you : it is a debt 
has in the last resort your liberty as a security, 
and, moreover, if this thing happens a second time, or 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 183 

if it is disease or imbecility you have multiplied, we will 
take an absolutely effectual guarantee that neither you 
nor your partner offend again in this matter. 
" Harsh ! " you say, and " Poor Humanity ! " 
You have the gentler alternative to study in your 
terrestrial slums and asylums. 

It may be urged that to permit conspicuously in- 
ferior people to have one or two children in this way 
would be to fail to attain the desired end, but, indeed, 
this is not so. A suitably qualified permission, as every 
statesman knows, may produce the social effects with- 
out producing the irksome pressure of an absolute pro- 
hibition. Amidst bright and comfortable circumstances, 
and with an easy and practicable alternative, people will 
exercise foresight and self-restraint to escape even the 
possibilities of hardship and discomfort ; and free life 
in Utopia is to be well worth this trouble even for in- 
ferior people. The growing comfort, self-respect, and 
intelligence of the English is shown, for example, in 
the fall in the proportion of illegitimate births from 
2.2 per 1,000 in 1846-50 to 1.2 per 1,000 in 1890-1900, 
and this without any positive preventive laws v/hatever. 
This most desirable result is pretty certainly not the 
consequence of any great exaltation of our moral tone, 
but simply of a rising standard of comfort and a livelier 
sense of consequences and responsibilities. If so marked 
a change is possible in response to such progress as 
England has achieved in the past fifty years, if discreet 
restraint can be so effectual as this, it seems reasonable 
to suppose that in the ampler knowledge and the cleaner, 



184 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

franker atmosphere of our Utopian planet the birth of a 
child to diseased or inferior parents, and contrary to 
the sanctions of the State, will be the rarest of disasters. 
And the death of a child, too, that most tragic event, 
Utopia will rarely know. Children are not born to die 
in childhood. But in our world, at present, through 
the defects of our medical science and nursing methods, 
through defects in our organisation, through poverty and 
carelessness, and through the birth of children that never 
ought to have been born, one out of every five children 
born dies within five years. It may be the reader has 
witnessed this most distressful of all human tragedies. 
It is sheer waste of suffering. There is no reason why 
ninety-nine out of every hundred children born should 
not live to a ripe age. Accordingly, in any Modern 
Utopia, it must be insisted they will. 



3 

All former Utopias have, by modern standards, erred 
on the side of over regulation in these matters. The 
amount of State interference with the marriage and 
birth of the citizens of a modern Utopia will be much 
less than in any terrestrial State. Here, just as in 
relation to property and enterprise, the law will regu- 
late only in order to secure the utmost freedom and 
initiative. 

Up to the beginning of this chapter, our Utopian 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 185 

speculations, like many Acts of Parliament, have ignored 
the difference of sex. " He " indeed is to be read as 
" He and She " in all that goes before. But we may 
now come to the sexual aspects of the modern ideal of 
a constitution of society in which, for all purposes of 
the individual, women are to be as free as men. This 
will certainly be realised in the Modern Utopia, if it can 
be realised at all not only for woman's sake, but for 
man's. 

But women may be free in theory and not in prac- 
tice, and as long as they suffer from their economic 
inferiority, from the inability to produce as much value 
as a man for the same amount of work and there can 
be no doubt of this inferiority so long will their legal 
and technical equality be a mockery. It is a fact that 
almost every point in which a woman differs from a 
man is an economic disadvantage to her, her incapacity 
for great stresses of exertion, her frequent liability to 
slight illnesses, her weaker initiative, her inferior inven- 
tion and resourcefulness^* her relative incapacity for 
organisation and combination, and the possibilities of 
emotional complications whenever she is in economic 
dependence on men. So long as women are compared 
economically with men and boys they will be inferior 
in precisely the measure in which they differ from men. 
All that constitutes this difference they are supposed 
not to trade upon except in one way, and that is by 
winning or luring a man to marry, selling themselves 
in an almost irrevocable bargain, and then following 
and sharing his fortunes for " better or worse." 



186 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

But do not let the proposition in its first crudity 
alarm you suppose the Modern Utopia equalises 
things between the sexes in the only possible way, by 
insisting that motherhood is a service to the State and 
a legitimate claim to a living ; and that, since the 
State is to exercise the right of forbidding or sanction- 
ing motherhood, a woman who is, or is becoming, a 
mother, is as much entitled to wages above the minimum 
wage, to support, to freedom, and to respect and dignity 
as a policeman, a solicitor-general, a king, a bishop in 
the State Church, a Government professor, or anyone 
else the State sustains. Suppose the State secures to 
every woman who is, under legitimate sanctions, be- 
coming or likely to become a mother, that is to say 
who is duly married, a certain wage from her husband 
to secure her against the need of toil and anxiety, 
suppose it pays her a certain gratuity upon the birth 
of a child, and continues to pay at regular intervals 
sums sufficient to keep her and her child in independent 
freedom, so long as the child keeps up to the minimum 
standard of health and physical and mental develop- 
ment. Suppose it pays more upon the child when it 
rises markedly above certain minimum qualifications, 
physical or mental, and, in fact, does its best to make 
thoroughly efficient motherhood a profession worth 
following. And suppose in correlation with this it 
forbids the industrial employment of married women 
and of mothers who have children needing care, 
s tiny an* iu a position to employ qualified 
.nt substitutes to take care of their offspring. 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 187 

What differences from terrestrial conditions will en- 
sue ? 

This extent of intervention will at least abolish two 
or three salient hardships and evils of the civilised life. 
It will abolish the hardship of the majority of widows, 
who on earth are poor and encumbered exactly in pro- 
portion as they have discharged the chief distinctive 
duty of a woman, and miserable, just in proportion as 
their standard of life and of education is high. It will 
abolish the hardship of those who do not now marry on 
account of poverty, or who do not dare to have children. 
The fear that often turns a woman from a beautiful to 
a mercenary marriage will vanish from life. In Utopia 
a career of wholesome motherhood would be, under such 
conditions as I have suggested, the normal and re- 
munerative calling for a woman, and a capable woman 
who has borne, bred, and begun the education of eight 
or nine weil-built, intelligent, and successful sons and 
daughters would be an extremely prosperous woman, 
quite irrespective of the economic fortunes of the man 
she has married. She would need to be an exceptional 
woman, and she would need to have chosen a man at 
least a little above the average as her partner in life. 
But his death, or misbehaviour, or misfortunes would 
not ruin her. 

Now such an arrangement is merely the completed 
induction from the starting propositions that make 
some measure of education free and compulsory for 
every child in the State. If you prevent people making 
profit out of their cnildren and every civilised State 



188 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

even that compendium of old-fashioned Individualism, 
the United States of America is now disposed to 
admit the necessity of that prohibition and if you 
provide for the aged instead of leaving them to their 
children's sense of duty, the practical inducements to 
parentage, except among very wealthy people, are greatly 
reduced. The sentimental factor in the case rarely 
leads to more than a solitary child or at most two to 
a marriage, and with a high and rising standard of 
comfort and circumspection it is unlikely that the birth- 
rate will ever rise very greatly again. The Utopians 
will hold that if you keep the children from profitable 
employment for the sake of the future, then, if you 
want any but the exceptionally rich, secure, pious, 
unselfish, or reckless to bear children freely, you must 
be prepared to throw the cost of their maintenance 
upon the general community. 

In short, Utopia will hold that sound childbearing 
and rearing is a service done, not to a particular man, 
but to the whole community, and all its legal arrange- 
ments for motherhood will be based on that conception. 



4 

And after these preliminaries we must proceed to 
ask, first, what will be the Utopian marriage law, and 
then what sort of customs and opinions are likely to be 
superadded to that law ? 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 189 

The trend of our reasoning has brought us to the 
conclusion that the Utopian State will feel justified in 
intervening between men and women on two accounts, 
first on account of paternity, and secondly on account 
of the clash of freedoms that may otherwise arise. The 
Utopian State will effectually interfere with and pre- 
scribe conditions for all sorts of contract, and for this 
sort of contract in particular it will be in agreement 
with almost every earthly State, in defining in the 
completest fashion what things a man or woman may 
be bound to do, and what they cannot be bound to do. 
From the point of view of a statesman, marriage is the 
union of a man and woman in a manner so intimate 
as to involve the probability of offspring, and it is 
of primary importance to the State, first in order to 
secure good births, and secondly good home conditions, 
that these unions should not be free, nor promiscuous, 
nor practically universal throughout the adult popu- 
lation. 

Prolific marriage must be a profitable privilege. It 
must occur only under certain obvious conditions, the 
contracting parties must be in health and condition, 
free from specific transmissible taints, above a certain 
minimum age, and sufficiently intelligent and energetic 
I to have acquired a minimum education. The man at 
least must be in receipt of a net income above the 
minimum wage, after any outstanding charges against 
him have been paid. All this much it is surely reason- 
able to insist upon before the State becomes responsible 
for the prospective children. The age at which men 



190 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

and women may contract to marry is difficult to deter- 
mine. But if we are, as far as possible, to put women 
on an equality with men, if we are to insist upon a 
universally educated population, and if we are seeking 
to reduce the infantile death-rate to zero, it must be 
much higher than it is in any terrestrial State. The 
woman should be at least one-and-twenty 5 the man 
twenty-six or twenty-seven. 

One imagines the parties to a projected marriage 
first obtaining licenses which will testify that these 
conditions are satisfied. From the point of view of 
the theoretical Utopian State, these licenses are the 
feature of primary importance. Then, no doubt, that 
universal register at Paris would come into play. As 
a matter of justice, there must be no deception between 
the two people, and the State will ensure that in certain 
broad essentials this is so. They would have to com- 
municate their joint intention to a public office after 
their personal licenses were granted, and each would 
be supplied with a copy of the index card of the pro- 
jected mate, on which would be recorded his or her age, 
previous marriages, legally important diseases, offspring, 
domiciles, public appointments, criminal convictions, 
registered assignments of property, and so forth. Pos- 
sibly it might be advisable to have a little ceremony 
for each party, for each in the absence of the other, in 
which this record could be read over in the presence 
of witnesses, together with some prescribed form of 
address of counsel in the matter. There would then 
be a reasonable interval for consideration and with- 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 191 

drawal on the part of either spouse. In the event of 
the two people persisting in their resolution, they would 
after this minimum interval signify as much to the 
local official and the necessary entry would be made in 
the registers. These formalities would be quite inde- 
pendent of any religious ceremonial the contracting 
parties might choose, for with religious belief and pro- 
cedure the modern State has no concern. 

So much for the preliminary conditions of matri- 
mony. For those men and women who chose to ignore 
these conditions and to achieve any sort of union they 
liked the State would have no concern, unless offspring 
were born illegitimately. In that case, as we have 
already suggested, it would be only reasonable to make 
the parents chargeable with every duty, with mainte- 
nance, education, and so forth, that in the normal course 
of things would fall to the State. It would be neces- 
sary to impose a life assurance payment upon these 
parents, and to exact effectual guarantees against every 
possible evasion of the responsibility they had incurred. 
But the further control of private morality, beyond 
the protection of the immature from corruption and 
evil example, will be no concern of the State's. When 
a child comes in, the future of the species comes in; 
and the State comes, in as the guardian of interests 
wider than the individual's ; but the adult's private life 
is the entirely private life into which the State may not 
intrude. 

Now what will be the nature of the Utopian con- 
tract of matrimony ? 



I 9 2 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

From the first of the two points of view named 
above, that of parentage, it is obvious that one un- 
avoidable condition will be the chastity of the wife. 
Her infidelity being demonstrated, must at once ter- 
minate the marriage and release both her husband 
and the State from any liability for the support of her 
illegitimate offspring. That, at any rate, is beyond 
controversy ; a marriage contract that does not involve 
that, is a triumph of metaphysics over common sense. 
It will be obvious that under Utopian conditions it is 
the State that will suffer injury by a wife's misconduct, 
and that a husband who condones anything of the sort 
will participate in her offence. A woman, therefore, 
who is divorced on this account will be divorced as a 
public offender, and not in the key of a personal 
quarrel ; not as one who has inflicted a private and 
personal wrong. This, too, lies within the primary 
implications of marriage. 

Beyond that, what conditions should a marriage 
contract in Utopia involve ? 

A reciprocal restraint on the part of the husband 
is clearly of no importance whatever, so far as the first 
end of matrimony goes, the protection "bf the. com- 
munity from inferior births. It is no wrong to the 
State. But it does carry with it a variable amount of 
emotional offence to the wife ; it may wound her pride 
and cause her violent perturbations of jealousy ', it may 
lead to her neglect, her solitude and unhappiness, and 
it may even work to her physical injury. There should 
be an implication that it is not to occur. She has 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 193 

bound herself to the man for the good of the State, 
and clearly it is reasonable that she should look to the 
State for relief if it does occur. The extent of the 
offence given her is the exact measure of her injury ; if 
she does not mind nobody minds, and if her self-respect 
does not suffer nothing whatever is lost to the world ; 
and so it should rest with her to establish his miscon- 
duct, and, if she thinks fit, to terminate the marriage. 

A failure on either side to perform the elementary 
duties of companionship, desertion, for example, should 
obviously give the other mate the right to relief, and 
clearly the development of any disqualifying habit, 
drunkenness, or drug-taking, or the like, or any serious 
crime or acts of violence, should give grounds for a 
final release. Moreover, the modern Utopian State 
intervenes between the sexes only because of the coming 
generation, and for it to sustain restrictions upon 
conduct in a continually fruitless marriage is obviously 
to lapse into purely moral intervention. It seems 
reasonable, therefore, to set a term to a marriage that 
remains childless, to let it expire at the end of three 
or four or five unfruitful years, but with no restriction 
upon the right of the husband and wife to marry each 
other again. 

These are the fairly easy primaries of this question. 
We now come to the more difficult issues of the matter. 
The first of these is the question of the economic re- 
lationships of husband and wife, having regard to the 
fact that even in Utopia women, at least until they 
become mothers, are likely to be on the average poorer 

7 



194 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

than men. The second is the question of the duration 
of a marriage. But the two interlock, ancl are, perhaps, 
best treated together in one common section. And 
they both ramify in the most complicated manner into 
the consideration of the general morale of the com- 
munity. 



5 

This question of marriage is the most complicated 
and difficult in the whole range of Utopian problems. 
But it is happily not the most urgent necessity that it 
should be absolutely solved. The urgent and necessary 
problem is the ruler. With rulers rightly contrived 
and a provisional defective marriage law a Utopia may 
be conceived as existing and studying to perfect itself, 
but without rulers a Utopia is impossible though the 
theory of its matrimony be complete. And the diffi- 
culty in this question is not simply the difficulty of a 
complicated chess problem, for example, in which the 
whole tangle of considerations does at least lie in one 
plane, but a series of problems upon different levels and 
containing incommensurable factors. 

It is very easy to repeat our initial propositions, to 
recall that we are on another planet, and that all the 
customs and traditions of the earth are set aside, but 
the faintest realisation of that demands a feat of psy- 
chological insight. We have all grown up into an 
invincible mould of suggestion about sexual things ; we 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 195 

regard this with approval, that with horror, and this 
again with contempt, very largely because the thing 
has always been put to us in this light or that. The 
more emancipated we think ourselves the more subtle 
are our bonds. The disentanglement of what is in- 
herent in these feelings from what is acquired is an 
extraordinary complex undertaking. Probably all men 
and women have a more or less powerful disposition to 
jealousy, but what exactly they will be jealous about 
and what exactly they will suffer seems part of the 
superposed factor. Probably all men and women are 
capable of ideal emotions and wishes beyond merely 
physical desires, but the shape these take are almost 
entirely a reaction to external images. And you really 
cannot strip the external off ; you cannot get your 
stark natural man, jealous, but not jealous about any- 
thing in particular, imaginative without any imagi- 
nings, proud at large. Emotional dispositions can no 
more exist without form than a man without air. Only 
a very observant man who had lived all over the planet 
Earth, in all sorts of social strata, and with every race 
and tongue, and who was endowed with great imagina- 
tive insight, could hope to understand the possibilities 
and the limitations of human plasticity in this matter, 
and say what any men and any women could be in- 
duced to do willingly, and just exactly what no man 
and no woman could stand, provided one had the 
training of them. Though very young men will tell 
you readily enough. The proceedings of other races 
and other ages do not seem to carry conviction ; what 



196 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

our ancestors did, or what the Greeks or Egyptians did, 
though it is the direct physical cause of the modern 
young man or the modern young lady, is apt to impress 
these remarkable consequences merely as an arrangement 
of quaint, comical or repulsive proceedings. 

But there emerges to the modern inquirer certain 
ideals and desiderata that at least go some way towards 
completing and expanding the crude primaries of a 
Utopian marriage law set out in 4. 

The sound birth being assured, does there exist any 
valid reason for the persistence of the Utopian marriage 
union ? 

There are two lines of reasoning that go to establish 
a longer duration for marriage. The first of these 
rests upon the general necessity for a home and for 
individual attention in the case of children. Children 
are the results of a choice between individuals ; they 
grow well, as a rule, only in relation to sympathetic 
and kindred individualities, and no wholesale character- 
ignoring method of dealing with them has ever had a 
shadow of the success of the individualised home. 
Neither Plato nor Socrates, who repudiated the home, 
seems ever to have had to do with anything younger 
than a young man. Procreation, is only the beginning 
of parentage, and even where the mother is not the 
direct nurse and teacher of her child, even where she 
delegates these duties, her supervision is, in the common 
case, essential to its welfare. Moreover, though the 
Utopian State will pay the mother4jand the mother 
only, for the being and welfare of herlegitimate chil- 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 197 

dren, there will be a clear advantage in fostering the 
natural disposition of the father to associate his child's 
welfare with his individual egotism, and to dispense 
some of his energies and earnings in supplementing 
the common provision of the State. It is an absurd 
disregard of a natural economy to leave the innate 
philoprogenitiveness of either sex uncultivated. Unless 
the parents continue in close relationship, if each is 
passing through a series of marriages, the dangers of a 
conflict of rights, and of the frittering away of emotions, 
become very grave. The family will lose homogeneity, 
and its individuals will have for the mother varied and 
perhaps incompatible emotional associations. The 
balance of social advantage is certainly on the side of 
much more permanent unions, on the side of an ar- 
rangement that, subject to ample provisions for a 
formal divorce without disgrace in cases of incompati- 
bility, would bind, or at least enforce ideals that would 
tend to bind, a man and woman together for the whole 
term of her maternal activity, until, that is, the last 
born of her children was no longer in need of her help. 

The second system of considerations arises out of 
the artificiality of woman's position. It is a less con- 
clusive series than the first, and it opens a number of 
interesting side vistas. 

A great deal of nonsense is talked about the natural 
equality or inferiority of women to men. But it is 
only the same quality that can be measured by degrees 
and ranged in ascending and descending series, and 
the things that are essentially feminine are different 



198 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

qualitatively from and incommensurable with the dis- 
tinctly masculine things. The relationship is in the 
region of ideals and conventions, and a State is per- 
fectly free to determine that men and women shall 
come to intercourse on a footing of conventional equality 
or with either the man or woman treated as the pre- 
dominating individual. Aristotle's criticism of Plato 
in this matter, his insistence upon the natural inferi- 
ority of slaves and women, is just the sort of confusion 
between inherent and imposed qualities that was his 
most characteristic weakness. The spirit of the Euro- 
pean people, of almost all the peoples now in the as- 
cendant, is towards a convention of equality 5 the 
spirit of the Mahometan world is towards the intensi- 
fication of a convention that the man alone is a citizen 
and that the woman is very largely his property. There 
can be no doubt that the latter of these two convenient 
fictions is the more primitive way of regarding this 
relationship. It is quite unfruitful to argue between 
these ideals as if there were a demonstrable conclusion, 
the adoption of either is an arbitrary act, and we shall 
simply follow our age and time if we display a certain 
bias for the former. 

If one looks closely into the various practical ex- 
pansions of these ideas, we find their inherent falsity 
works itself out in a very natural way so soon as reality 
is touched. Those who insist upon equality work in 
effect for assimilation, for a similar treatment of the 
sexes. Plato's women of the governing class, for ex- 
ample, were to strip for gymnastics like men, to bear 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 199 

arms and go to war, and follow most of the masculine 
occupations of their class. They were to have the 
same education and to be assimilated to men at every 
doubtful point. The Aristotelian attitude, on the other 
hand, insists upon specialisation. The men are to 
rule and fight and toil ; the women are to support 
motherhood in a state of natural inferiority. The 
trend of evolutionary forces through long centuries 
of human development has been on the whole in this 
second direction, has been towards differentiation.* 
An adult white woman differs far more from a white 
man than a negress or pigmy woman from her equiva- 
lent male. The education, the mental disposition, of 
a white or Asiatic woman, reeks of sex ; her modesty, 
her decorum is not to ignore sex but to refine and put 
a point to it ; her costume is clamorous with the dis- : 
tinctive elements of her form. The white woman in 
the materially prosperous nations is more of a sexual 
specialist than her sister of the poor and austere peoples, 
of the prosperous classes more so than the peasant 
woman. The contemporary woman of fashion who 
sets the tone of occidental intercourse is a stimulant 
rather than a companion for a man. Too commonly 
she is an unwholesome stimulant turning a man from 
wisdom to appearance, from beauty to beautiful pleas- 
ures, from form to colour, from persistent aims to 
belief and stirring triumphs. Arrayed in what she calls 
distinctly " dress," scented, adorned, displayed, she 
achieves by artifice a sexual differentiation profounder 

* See Havelock Ellis's Man and Woman. 



200 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

than that of any other vertebrated animal. She 
outshines the peacock's excess above his mate, one must 
probe among the domestic secrets of the insects and 
Crustacea to find her living parallel. And it is a ques- 
tion by no means easy and yet of the utmost importance, 
to determine how far the wide and widening differences 
between the human sexes is inherent and inevitable, 
and how far it is an accident of social development 
that may be converted and reduced under a different 
social regimen. Are we going to recognise and accentuate 
this difference and to arrange our Utopian organisation 
to play upon it, are we to have two primary classes of 
human being, harmonising indeed and reacting, but 
following essentially different lives, or are we going to 
minimise this difference in every possible way ? 

The former alternative leads either to a romantic 
organisation of society in which men will live and fight 
and die for wonderful, beautiful, exaggerated creatures, 
or it leads to the hareem. It .would probably lead 
through one phase to the other. Women would be 
enigmas and mysteries and maternal dignitaries that 
one would approach in a state of emotional excitement 
and seclude piously when serious work was in hand. 
A girl would blossom from the totally negligible to the 
mystically desirable at adolescence, and boys would be 
removed from their mother's educational influence at as 
early an age as possible. Whenever men and women 
met together, the men would be in a state of inflamed 
competition towards one another, and the women like- 
wise, and the intercourse of ideas would be in suspense. 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 201 

Under the latter alternative the sexual relation would 
be subordinated to friendship and companionship ; 
boys and girls would be co-educated very largely 
under maternal direction, and women, disarmed of their 
distinctive barbaric adornments, the feathers, beads, 
lace, and trimmings that enhance their clamorous claim 
to a directly personal attention would mingle, accord- 
ing to their quality, in the counsels and intellectual 
development of men. Such women would be fit to 
educate boys even up to adolescence. It is obvious 
that a marriage law embodying a decision between 
these two sets of ideas would be very different accord- 
ing to the alternative adopted. In the former case a 
man would be expected to earn and maintain in an 
adequate manner the dear delight that had favoured 
him. He would tell her beautiful lies about her won- 
derful moral effect upon him, and keep her sedulously 
from all responsibility and knowledge. And, since there 
is an undeniably greater imaginative appeal to men in 
the first bloom of a woman's youth, she would have 
a distinct claim upon his energies for the rest of her 
life. In the latter case a man would no more pay 
for and support his wife than she would do so for him. 
They would be two friends, differing in kind no doubt 
but differing reciprocally, who had linked themselves 
in a matrimonial relationship. Our Utopian marriage 
so far as \ve have discussed it, is indeterminate between 
these alternatives. 

We have laid it down as a general principle that 
the private morals of an adult citizen are no concern 



202 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

for the State. But that involves a decision to dis- 
regard certain types of bargain. A sanely contrived 
State will refuse to sustain bargains wherein there is 
no plausibly fair exchange, and if private morality is 
really to be outside the scope of the State then the 
affections and endearments most certainly must not be 
regarded as negotiable commodities. The State, there- 
fore, will absolutely ignore the distribution of these 
favours unless children, or at least the possibility of 
children, is involved. It follows that it will refuse to 
recognise any debts or transfers of property that are 
based on such considerations. It will be only con- 
sistent, therefore, to refuse recognition in the marriage 
contract to any financial obligation between husband 
and wife, or any settlements qualifying that contract, 
except when they are in the nature of accessory pro- 
vision for the prospective children.* So far the 
Utopian State will throw its weight upon the side of 
those who advocate the independence of women and 
their conventional equality with men. 

But to any further definition of the marriage rela- 
tion the World State of Utopia will not commit itself. 
The wide range of relationships that are left possible, 
within and without the marriage code, are entirely a 
matter for the individual choice and imagination. 
Whether a man treat his wife in private as a goddess 

* Unqualified gifts for love by solvent people will, of course, be 
quite possible and permissible, unsalaried services and the like, pro- 
vided the standard of life is maintained and the joint income of the 
couple between whom the services hold does not sink below twice the 
minimum wage. 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 203 

to be propitiated, as a " mystery " to be adored, as an 
agreeable auxiliary, as a particularly intimate friend, 
or as the wholesome mother of his children, is entirely 
a matter for their private intercourse : whether he 
keep her in Oriental idleness or active co-operation, 
or leave her to live her independent life, rests with 
the couple alone, and all the possible friendship and 
intimacies outside marriage also lie quite beyond the 
organisation of the modern State. Religious teaching 
and literature may affect these ; customs may arise ; 
certain types of relationship may involve social isolation ; 
the justice of the statesman is blind to such things. 
It may be urged that according to Atkinson's illuminat- 
ing analysis * the control of love-making was the very 
origin of the human community. In Utopia, neverthe- 
less, love-making is no concern of the State's beyond 
the province that the protection of children covers, f 
Change of function is one of the ruling facts in life, 
the sac that was in our remotest ancestors a swimming 
bladder is now a lung, and the State which was once, 
perhaps, no more than the jealous and tyrannous will 
of the strongest male in the herd, the instrument of 

* See Lang and Atkinson's Social Origins and Primal Law. 

| It cannot be made too clear that though the control of morality 
is outside the law the State must maintain a general decorum, a sys- 
tematic suppression of powerful and moving examples, and of inci- 
tations and temptations of the young and inexperienced, and to that 
extent it will, of course, in a sense, exercise a control over morals. 
But this will be only part of a wider law to safeguard the tender mind. 
For example, lying advertisements, and the like, when they lean to- 
wards adolescent interests, will encounter a specially disagreeable 
disposition in the law, over and above the treatment of their general 
dishonesty. 



204 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

justice and equality. The State intervenes now only 
where there is want of harmony between individuals 
individuals who exist or who may presently come into 
existence. 



6 

It must be reiterated that our reasoning still leaves 
Utopian marriage an institution with wide possibilities 
of variation. We have tried to give effect to the ideal 
of a virtual equality, an equality of spirit between men 
and women, and in doing so we have overridden the 
accepted opinion of the great majority of mankind. 
Probably the first writer to do as much was Plato. 
His argument in support of this innovation upon natural 
human feeling was thin enough a mere analogy to 
illustrate the spirit of his propositions ; it was his crea- 
tive instinct that determined him. In the atmosphere 
of such speculations as this, Plato looms very large 
indeed, and in view of what we owe to him, it seems 
reasonable that we should hesitate before dismissing as 
a thing prohibited and evil, a type of marriage that he 
made almost the central feature in the organisation of 
the ruling class, at least, of his ideal State. He was 
persuaded that the narrow monogamic family is apt to 
become illiberal and anti-social, to withdraw the imagi- 
nation and energies of the citizen from the services of 
the community as a whole, and the Roman Catholic 
Church has so far endorsed and substantiated his opinion 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 205 

as to forbid family relations to its priests and significant 
servants. He conceived of a poetic devotion to the 
public idea, a devotion of which the mind of Aristotle, 
as his criticisms of Plato show, was incapable, as a sub- 
stitute for the warm and tender but illiberal emotions 
of the home. But while the Church made the alterna- 
tive to family ties celibacy * and participation in an 
organisation, Plato was far more in accordance with 
modern ideas in perceiving the disadvantage that would 
result from precluding the nobler types of character 
from offspring. He sought a way to achieve progeny, 
therefore, without the narrow concentration of the sym- 
pathies about the home, and he found it in a multiple 
marriage in which every member of the governing class 
was considered to be married to all the others. But the 
detailed operation of this system he put tentatively and 
very obscurely. His suggestions have the experimental 
inconsistency of an enquiring man. He left many things 
altogether open, and it is unfair to him to adopt Aris- 
totle's forensic method and deal with his discussion as 
though it was a fully-worked-out project. It is clear 
that Plato intended every member of his governing class 
to be so " changed at birth " as to leave paternity un- 
traceable ; mothers were not to know their children, 
nor children their parents, but there is nothing to forbid 
the supposition that he intended these people to select 
and adhere to congenial mates within the great family. 
Aristotle's assertion that the Platonic republic left no 

* The warm imagination of Campanella, that quaint Calabrian 
monastic, fired by Plao, reversed this aspect of the Church. 



206 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

'scope for the virtue of continence shows that he had 
jumped to just the same conclusions a contemporary 
London errand boy, hovering a little shamefacedly over 
Jowett in a public library, might be expected to reach. 

Aristotle obscures Plato's intention, it may be acci- 
dentally, by speaking of his marriage institution as a 
community of wives. When reading Plato he could not 
or would not escape reading in his own conception of 
the natural ascendency of men, his idea of property in 
women and children. But as Plato intended women to 
be conventionally equal to men, this phrase belies him 
altogether ; community of husbands and wives would be 
truer to his proposal. Aristotle condemns Plato as 
roundly as any commercial room would condemn him 
to-day, and in much the same spirit ; he asserts rather 
than proves that such a grouping is against the nature 
of man. He wanted to have women property just as 
he wanted to have slaves property, he did not care to 
ask why, and it distressed his conception of convenience 
extremely to imagine any other arrangement. It is no 
doubt true that the natural instinct of either sex is ex- 
clusive of participators in intimacy during a period of 
intimacy, but it was probably Aristotle who gave Plato 
an offensive interpretation in this matter. No one would 
freely submit to such a condition of affairs as multiple 
marriage carried out, in the spirit of the Aristotelian 
interpretation, to an obscene completeness, but that is 
all the more reason why the modern Utopia should not 
refuse a grouped marriage to three or more freely con- 
senting persons. There is no sense in prohibiting insti- 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 207 

tutions which no sane people could ever want to abuse. 
It is claimed though the full facts are difficult to ascer- 
tain that a group marriage of over two hundred per- 
sons was successfully organised by John Humphrey 
Noyes at Oneida Creek.* It is fairly certain in the 
latter case that there was no " promiscuity," and that 
the members mated for variable periods, and often for 
life, within the group. The documents are reasonably 
clear upon that point. This Oneida community was, 
in fact, a league of two hundred persons to regard their 
children as " common." Choice and preference were 
not abolished in the community, though in some cases 
they were set aside just as they are by many parents 
under our present conditions. There seems to have 
been a premature attempt at " stirpiculture," at what 
Mr. Francis Galton now calls " Eugenics," in the mating 
of the members, and there was also a limitation of 
offspring. Beyond these points the inner secrets of 
the community do not appear to be very profound ; 
its atmosphere was almost commonplace, it was made 
up of very ordinary people. There is no doubt that 
it had a career of exceptional success throughout the 
whole lifetime of its founder, and it broke down with 
the advent of a new generation, with the onset of theo- 
logical differences, and the loss of its guiding intelli- 
gence. The Anglo-Saxon spirit, it has been said by one 

* See John H. Noyes's History of American Socialisms and his 
writings generally. The bare facts of this and the other American 
experiments are given, together with more recent matter, by Morris 
Hillquirt, in The History of Socialism in the United States. 



208 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

of the ablest children of the experiment, is too indi- 
vidualistic for communism. It is possible to regard the 
temporary success of this complex family as a strange 
accident, as the wonderful exploit of what was certainly 
a very exceptional man. Its final disintegration into 
frankly monogamic couples it is still a prosperous 
business association may be taken as an experimental 
verification of Aristotle's common-sense psychology, and 
was probably merely the public acknowledgment of con- 
ditions already practically established. 

Out of respect for Plato we cannot ignore this possi- 
bility of multiple marriage altogether in our Utopian 
theorising, but even if we leave this possibility open we 
jure still bound to regard it as a thing so likely to be 
rare as not to come at all under our direct observation 
during our Utopian journeyings. But in one sense, of 
course, in the sense that the State guarantees care and 
support for all properly born children, our entire Utopia 
is to be regarded as a comprehensive marriage group.* 

It must be remembered that a modern Utopia must 
differ from the Utopias of any preceding age in being 
world-wide ; it is not, therefore, to be the development 
of any special race or type of culture, as Plato's devel- 
oped an Athenian-Spartan blend, or More, Tudor Eng- 
'and. The modern Utopia is to be, before all things, 
synthetic. Politically and socially, as linguistically, we 

* The Thelema of Rabelais, with its principle of " Fay ce que 
!--as " within the limits of the order, is probably intended to 
suggest a Platonic complex marriage after the fashion of our inter- 
pretation. 



WOMEN IN A MODERN UTOPIA. 209 

must suppose it a synthesis ; politically it will be a 
synthesis of once widely different forms of government ; 
socially and morally, a synthesis of a great variety of 
domestic traditions and ethical habits. Into the modern 
Utopia there must have entered the mental tendencies and 
origins that give our own world the polygamy of the 
Zulus and of Utah, the polyandry of Tibet, the latitudes 
of experiment permitted in the United States, and the 
divorceless wedlock of Comte. The tendency of all syn- 
thetic processes in matters of law and custom is to re- 
duce and simplify the compulsory canon, to admit alter- 
natives and freedoms ; what were laws before become 
traditions of feeling and style, and in no matter will this 
be more apparent than in questions affecting the rela- 
tions of the sexes. 



CHAPTER THE SEVENTH 

A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS 
I 

BUT now we are in a better position to describe the 
houses and ways of the Utopian townships about 
the Lake of Lucerne, and to glance a little more nearly 
at the people who pass. You figure us as curiously 
settled down in Utopia, as working for a low wage at 
wood-carving, until the authorities at the central regis- 
try in Paris can solve the perplexing problem we have 
set them. We stay in an inn looking out upon the 
lake, and go to and fro for our five hours' work a day, 
with a curious effect of having been born Utopians. 
The rest of our time is our own. 

Our inn is one of those inns and lodging houses which 
have a minimum tariff, inns which are partly regu- 
lated, and, in the default of private enterprise, main- 
tained and controlled by the World State throughout 
the entire world. It is one of several such establish- 
ments in Lucerne. It possesses many hundreds of prac- 
tically self-cleaning little bedrooms, equipped very much 
after the fashion of the rooms we occupied in the similar 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 211 

but much smaller inn at Hospenthal, differing only a 
little in the decoration. There is the same dressing- 
room recess with its bath, the same graceful proportion 
in the succinct simplicity of its furniture. This par- 
ticular inn is a quadrangle after the fashion of an Oxford 
college ; it is perhaps forty feet high, and with about 
five stories of bedrooms above its lower apartments ; 
the windows of the rooms look either outward or in- 
ward to the quadrangle, and the doors give upon arti- 
ficially-lit passages with staircases passing up and down. 
These passages are carpeted with a sort of cork carpet, 
but are otherwise bare. The lower story is occupied by 
the equivalent of a London club, kitchens and other 
offices, dining-room, writing-room, smoking and assem- 
bly-rooms, a barber's shop, and a library. A colonnade 
with seats runs about the quadrangle, and in the middle 
is a grass-plot. In the centre of this a bronze figure, a 
sleeping child, reposes above a little basin and fountain, 
in which water lilies are growing. The place has been 
designed by an architect happily free from the hamper- 
ing traditions of Greek temple building, and of Roman 
and Italian palaces ; it is simple, unaffected, gracious. 
The material is some artificial stone with the dull sur- 
face and something of the tint of yellow ivory ; the 
colour is a little irregular, and a partial confession of 
girders and pillars breaks this front of tender colour with 
lines and mouldings of greenish gray, that blend with 
the tones of the leaden gutters and rain pipes from the 
light red roof. At one point only does any explicit effort 
towards artistic effect appear, and that is in the great 



212 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

arched gateway opposite my window. Two or three 
abundant yellow roses climb over the face of the build- 
ing, and when I look out of my window in the early 
morning for the usual Utopian working day commences 
within an hour of sunrise I see Pilatus above this 
outlook, rosy in the morning sky. 

This quadrangle type of building is the prevalent 
element in Utopian Lucerne, and one may go from 
end to end of the town along corridors and covered 
colonnades without emerging by a gateway into the 
open roads at all. Small shops are found in these 
colonnades, but the larger stores are usually housed 
in buildings specially adapted to their needs. The 
majority of the residential edifices are far finer and 
more substantial than our own modest shelter, though 
we gather from such chance glimpses as we get of their 
arrangements that the labour-saving ideal runs through 
every grade of this servantless world ; and what we 
should consider a complete house in earthly England 
is hardly known here. 

The autonomy of the household has been reduced 
far below terrestrial conditions by hotels and clubs, 
and all sorts of co-operative expedients. People who 
do not live in hotels seem usually to live in clubs. The 
fairly prosperous Utopian belongs, in most cases, to one 
or two residential clubs of congenial men and women. 
These clubs usually possess in addition to furnished 
bedrooms more or less elaborate suites of apartments, 
and if a man prefers it one of these latter can be taken 
and furnished according to his personal taste. A 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 213 

pleasant boudoir, a private library and study, a private 
garden plot, are among the commonest of such luxuries. 
Devices to secure roof gardens, loggias, verandahs, and 
such-like open-air privacies to the more sumptuous of 
these apartments, give interest and variety to Utopian 
architecture. There are sometimes little cooking cor- 
ners in these flats as one would call them on earth 
but the ordinary Utopian would no more think of a 
special private kitchen for his dinners than he would 
think of a private flour mill or dairy farm. Business, 
private work, and professional practice go on sometimes 
in the house apartments, but often in special offices in 
the great warren of the business quarter. A common 
garden, an infant school, play rooms, and a playing 
garden for children, are universal features of the club 
quadrangles. 

Two or three main roads with their tramways, their 
cyclists' paths, and swift traffic paths, will converge on 
the urban centre, where the public offices will stand 
in a group close to the two or three theatres and the 
larger shops, and hither, too, in the case of Lucerne, 
the head of the swift railway to Paris and England 
and Scotland, and to the Rhineland and Germany will 
run. And as one walks out from the town centre one 
will come to that mingling of homesteads and open 
country which will be the common condition of all 
the more habitable parts of the globe. 

Here and there, no doubt, will stand quite solitary 
homesteads, homesteads that will nevertheless be lit 
and warmed by cables from the central force station, 



214 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

that will share the common water supply, will have 
their perfected telephonic connection with the rest 
of the world, with doctor, shop, and so forth, and may 
even have a pneumatic tube for books and small parcels 
to the nearest post-office. But the solitary homestead, 
as a permanent residence, will be something of a luxury 
the resort of rather wealthy garden lovers ; and most 
people with a bias for retirement will probably get as 
much residential solitude as they care for in the hire of 
a holiday chalet in a forest, by remote lagoons or high 
up the mountain side. 

The solitary house may indeed prove to be very rare 
indeed in Utopia. The same forces, the same facilitation 
of communications that will diffuse the towns will tend 
to little concentrations of the agricultural population 
over the country side. The field workers will probably 
take their food with them to their work during the day, 
and for the convenience of an interesting dinner and of 
civilised intercourse after the working day is over, they 
will most probably live in a college quadrangle with a 
common room and club. I doubt if there will be any 
agricultural labourers drawing wages in Utopia. I am 
inclined to imagine farming done by tenant associations, 
by little democratic unlimited liability companies work- 
ing under elected managers, and paying not a fixed rent 
but a share of the produce to the State. Such com- 
panies could reconstruct annually to weed out indolent 
members.* A minimum standard of efficiency in farm- 

* Schemes for the co-operative association of producers will be 
found in Dr. Hertzka's Fretland. 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 215 

ing would be ensured by fixing a minimum beneath which 
the rent must not fall, and perhaps by inspection. The 
general laws respecting the standard of life would, of 
course, apply to such associations. This type of co-opera- 
tion presents itself to me as socially the best arrangement 
for productive agriculture and horticulture, but such 
enterprises as stock breeding, seed farming, and the 
stocking and loan of agricultural implements are prob- 
ably, and agricultural research and experiment certainly, 
best handled directly by large companies or the muni- 
cipality or the State. 

But I should do little to investigate this question ; 
these are presented as quite incidental impressions. 
You must suppose that for the most part our walks 
and observations keep us within the more urban quar- 
ters of Lucerne. From a number of beautifully printed 
placards at the street corners, adorned with caricatures 
of considerable pungency, we discover an odd little elec- 
tion is in progress. This is the selection, upon strictly 
democratic lines, with a suffrage that includes every 
permanent resident in the Lucerne ward over the age 
of fifteen, of the ugliest local building. The old little 
urban and local governing bodies, we find, have long 
since been superseded by great provincial municipalities 
for all the more serious administrative purposes, but 
they still survive to discharge a number of curious minor 
functions, and not the least among these is this sort of 
aesthetic ostracism. Every year every minor local gov- 
erning body pulls down a building selected by local 
plebiscite, and the greater Government pays a slight 



216 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

compensation to the owner, and resumes possession of 
the land it occupies. The idea would strike us at first 
as simply whimsical, but in practice it appears to work 
as a cheap and practical device for the aesthetic educa- 
tion of builders, engineers, business men, opulent persons, 
and the general body of the public. But when we come 
to consider its application to our own world we should 
perceive it was the most Utopian thing we had so far 
encountered. 



2 

The factory that employs us is something very differ- 
ent from the ordinary earthly model. Our business is to 
finish making little wooden toys bears, cattle men, and 
the like for children. The things are made in the rough 
by machinery, and then finished by hand, because the 
work of unskilful but interested men and it really is 
an extremely amusing employment is found to give a 
personality and interest to these objects no machine can 
ever attain. 

We carvers who are the riffraff of Utopia work in 
a long shed together, nominally by time ; we must 
keep at the job for the length of the spell, but we are 
expected to finish a certain number of toys for each 
spell of work. The rules of the game as between employer 
and employed in this particular industry hang on the wall 
behind us ; they are drawn up by a conference of the 
Common Council of Wages Workers with the employers,. 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 217 

a common council which has resulted in Utopia from a 
synthesis of the old Trades Unions, and which has become 
a constitutional power ; but any man who has skill or 
humour is presently making his own bargain with our 
employer more or less above that datum line. 

Our employer is a quiet blue-eyed man with a humor- 
ous smile. He dresses wholy in an indigo blue, that 
later we come to consider a sort of voluntary uniform 
for Utopian artists. *As he walks about the workshop, 
stopping to laugh at this production or praise that, one 
is reminded inevitably of an art school. Every now and 
then he carves a little himself or makes a sketch or de- 
parts to the machinery to order some change in the 
rough shapes it is turning out. Our work is by no means 
confined to animals. After a time I am told to special- 
ise in a comical little Roman-nosed pony ; but several 
of the better paid carvers work up caricature images of 
eminent Utopians. Over these our employer is most 
disposed to meditate, and from them he darts off most 
frequently to improve the type. 

It is high summer, and our shed lies open at either 
end. On one hand is a steep mountain side down which 
there comes, now bridging a chasm, now a mere straight 
groove across a meadow, now hidden among green 
branches, the water-slide that brings our trees from the 
purple forest overhead. Above us, but nearly hidden, hums 
the machine shed, but we see a corner of the tank into 
which, with a mighty splash, the pine trees are delivered. 
Every now and then, bringing with him a gust of resin- 
ous smell, a white-clad machinist will come in with a 



218 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

basketful of crude, unwrought little images, and will 
turn them out upon the table from which we carvers 
select them. 

(Whenever I think of Utopia that faint and fluc- 
tuating smell of resin returns to me, and whenever I 
smell resin, comes the memory of the open end of the 
shed looking out upon the lake, the blue-green lake, 
the boats mirrored in the water, and far and high be- 
yond floats the atmospheric fairyland of the mountains 
of Glarus, twenty miles away.) 

The cessation of the second and last spell of work 
comes about midday, and then we walk home, through 
this beautiful intricacy of a town to our cheap hotel 
beside the lake. 

We should go our way with a curious contentment, 
for all that we were earning scarcely more than the 
minimum wage. We should have, of course, our un- 
easiness about the final decisions of that universal eye 
which has turned upon us, we should have those ridicu- 
lous sham numbers on our consciences ; but that 
general restlessness, that brooding stress that pursues 
the weekly worker on earth, that aching anxiety that 
drives him so often to stupid betting, stupid drinking, 
and violent and mean offences will have vanished out of 
mortal experience. 

3 

I should find myself contrasting my position with 
my preconceptions about a Utopian visit. I had always 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 219 

imagined myself as standing outside the general ma- 
chinery of the State in the distinguished visitors' 
gallery, as it were and getting the new world in a 
series of comprehensive perspective views. But this 
Utopia, for all the sweeping floats of generalisation I 
do my best to maintain, is swallowing me up. I find 
myself going between my work and the room in which 
I sleep and the place in which I dine, very much as I 
went to and fro in that real world into which I fell 
five-and-forty years ago. I find about me mountains 
and horizons that limit my view, institutions that vanish 
also without an explanation, beyond the limit of sight, 
and a great complexity of things I do not understand 
and about which, to tell the truth, I do not formulate 
acute curiosities. People, very unrepresentative people, 
people just as casual as people in the real world, come 
into personal relations with us, and little threads of 
private and immediate interest spin themselves rapidly 
into a thickening grey veil across the general view. I 
lose the comprehensive interrogation of my first arrival ; 
I find myself interested in the grain of the wood I 
work, in birds among the tree branches, in little irrele- 
vant things, and it is only now and then that I get 
fairly back to the mood that takes all Utopia for its 
picture. 

We spend our first surplus of Utopian money in the 
reorganisation of our wardrobes upon more Utopian 
lines | we develop acquaintance with several of our 
fellow workers, and of those who share our table at 
the inn. We pass insensibly into acquaintanceships 



220 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

and the beginnings of friendships. The World Utopia, 
I say, seems for a time to be swallowing me up. At 
the thought of detail it looms too big for me. The 
question of government, of its sustaining ideas, of race, 
and the wider future, hang like the arch of the sky 
over these daily incidents, very great indeed, but very 
remote. These people about me are everyday people, 
people not so very far from the minimum wage, accus- 
tomed much as the everyday people of earth are accus- 
tomed to take their world as they find it. Such en- 
quiries as I attempt are pretty obviously a bore to 
them, pass outside their range as completely as Utopian 
speculation on earth outranges a stevedore or a member 
of Parliament or a working plumber. Even the little 
things of daily life interest them in a different way. 
So I get on with my facts and reasoning rather slowly. 
I find myself looking among the pleasant multitudes of 
the streets for types that promise congenial conver- 
sation. 

My sense of loneliness is increased during this inter- 
lude by the better social success of the botanist. I 
find him presently falling into conversation with two 
women who are accustomed to sit at a table near our 
own. They wear the loose, coloured robes of soft 
material that are the usual wear of common adult 
Utopian women ; they are both dark and sallow, and 
they affect amber and crimson in their garments. 
Their faces strike me as a little unintelligent, and 
n is a faint touch of middle-aged coquetry in their 
bearing that I do not like. Yet on earth we should 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 221 

consider them women of exceptional refinement. But 
the botanist evidently sees in this direction scope for 
the feelings that have wilted a little under my in- 
attention, and he begins that petty intercourse of a 
word, of a slight civility, of vague enquiries and com- 
parisons that leads at last to associations and confidences. 
Such superficial confidences, that is to say, as he finds 
satisfactory. 

This throws me back upon my private observations. 

The general effect of a Utopian population is vigour. 
Everyone one meets seems to be not only in good health 
but in training ; one rarely meets fat people, bald 
people, or bent or grey. People who would be obese 
or bent and obviously aged on earth are here in good 
repair, and as a consequence the whole effect of a crowd 
is livelier and more invigorating than on earth. The 
dress is varied and graceful ; that of the women re- 
minds one most of the Italian fifteenth century ; they 
have an abundance of soft and beautifully-coloured 
stuffs, and the clothes, even of the poorest, fit admir- 
ably. Their hair is very simply but very carefully and 
beautifully dressed, and except in very sunny weather 
they do not wear hats or bonnets. There is little 
difference in deportment between one class and another ; 
they all are graceful and bear themselves with quiet 
dignity, and among a group of them a European woman 
of fashion in her lace and feathers, her hat and metal 
ornaments, her mixed accumulations of " trimmings," 
would look like a barbarian tricked out with the mis- 
cellaneous plunder of a museum. Boys and girls wear 



222 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

much the same sort of costume brown leather shoes, 
then a sort of combination of hose and close-fitting 
trousers that reaches from toe to waist, and over this 
a beltless jacket fitting very well, or a belted tunic. 
Many slender women wear the same sort of costume. 
We should see them in it very often in such a place 
as Lucerne, as they returned from expeditions in the 
mountains. The older men would wear long robes 
very frequently, but the greater proportion of the men 
would go in variations of much the same costume as 
the children. There would certainly be hooded cloaks 
and umbrellas for rainy weather, high boots for mud 
and snow, and cloaks and coats and furry robes for the 
winter. There would be no doubt a freer use of colour 
than terrestrial Europe sees in these days, but the costume 
of the women at least would be soberer and more 
practical, and (in harmony with our discussion in the 
previous chapter) less differentiated from the men's. 

But these, of course, are generalisations. These 
are the mere translation of the social facts we have 
hypothecated into the language of costume. There 
will be a great variety of costume and no compulsions. 
The doubles of people who are naturally foppish on 
earth will be foppish in Utopia, and people who have 
no natural taste on earth will have inartistic equivalents. 
Everyone will not be quiet in tone, or harmonious, or 
beautiful. Occasionally, as I go through the streets 
to my work, I shall turn round to glance again at some 
robe shot with gold embroidery, some slashing of the 
sleeves, some eccentricity of cut, or some discord or 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 223 

untidiness. But these will be but transient flashes in 
a general flow of harmonious graciousness ; dress will 
have scarcely any of that effect of disorderly conflict, 
of self-assertion qualified by the fear of ridicule, that 
it has in the crudely competitive civilisations of earth. 

I shall have the seeker's attitude of mind during 
those few days at Lucerne. I shall become a student 
of faces. I shall be, as it were, looking for someone. 
I shall see heavy faces, dull faces, faces with an uncon- 
genial animation, alien faces, and among these some 
with an immediate quality of appeal. I should see 
desirable men approaching me, and I should think ; 
" Now, if I were to speak to you ? " Many of these 
latter I should note wore the same clothing as the man 
who spoke to us at Wassen ; I should begin to think 
of it as a sort of uniform. . . . 

Then I should see grave-faced girls, girls of that 
budding age when their bearing becomes delusively 
wise, and the old deception of my youth will recur to 
me ; " Could you and I but talk together ? " I should 
think. Women will pass me lightly, women with open 
and inviting faces, but they will not attract me, and there 
will come beautiful women, women with that touch of 
claustral preoccupation which forbids the thought of any 
near approach. They are private and secret, and I may 
not enter, I know, into their thoughts. . . . 

I go as often as I can to the seat by the end of old 
Kapelbrucke, and watch the people passing over. 

I shall find a quality of dissatisfaction throughout 
all these days. I shall come to see this period more 



224 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

and more distinctly as a pause, as a waiting interlude, 
and the idea of an encounter with my double, which 
came at first as if it were a witticism, as something 
verbal and surprising, begins to take substance. The 
idea grows in my mind that after all this is the " some- 
one " I am seeking, this Utopian self of mine. I had 
at first an idea of a grotesque encounter, as of some- 
thing happening in a looking glass, but presently it 
dawns on me that my Utopian self must be a very 
different person from me. His training will be different, 
his mental content different. But between us there 
will be a strange link of essential identity, a sympathy, 
an understanding. I find the thing rising suddenly tc 
a preponderance in my mind. I find the interest of 
details dwindling to the vanishing point. That I have 
come to Utopia is the lesser thing now j the greater is 
that I have come to meet myself. 

I spend hours trying to imagine the encounter, in- 
venting little dialogues. I go alone to the Bureau 
to find if any news has come to hand from the Great 
Index in Paris, but I am told to wait another twenty- 
four hours. I cease absolutely to be interested in 
anything else, except so far as it leads towards inter- 
course with this being who is to be at once so strangely 
alien and so totally mine. 



' 

4 

Wrapped up in these preoccupations as I am, it 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 225 

will certainly be the botanist who will notice the com- 
parative absence of animals about us. 

He will put it in the form of a temperate objection 
to the Utopian planet. 

He is a professed lover of dogs and there are none. 
We have seen no horses and only one or two mules on 
the day of our arrival, and there seems not a cat in 
the world. I bring my mind round to his suggestion. 
" This follows," I say. 

It is only reluctantly that I allow myself to be drawn 
from my secret musings into a discussion of Utopian 
pets. 

I try to explain that a phase in the world's develop- 
ment is inevitable when a systematic world-wide attempt 
will be made to destroy for ever a great number of 
contagious and infectious diseases, and that this will 
involve, for a time at any rate, a stringent suppression 
of the free movement of familiar animals. Utopian 
houses, streets and drains will be planned and built 
to make rats, mice, and such-like house parasites im- 
possible j the race of cats and dogs providing, as it 
{foes, living fastnesses to which such diseases as plague, 
influenza, catarrhs and the like, can retreat to sally forth 
gain must pass for a time out of freedom, and the 
th made by horses and the other brutes of the high- 
ly vanish from the face of the earth. These things 
;e an old story to me, and perhaps explicitness 
through my brevity. 

list fails altogether to grasp what the dis- 
appearw e of diseases means. His mind has no imagi- 
\ 8 



en: 



226 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

native organ of that compass. As I talk his mind rests 
on one fixed image. This presents what the botanist 
would probably call a "dear old doggie "-which the 
botanist would make believe did not possess any sensible 
odour and it has faithful brown eyes and understands 
everything you say. The botanist would make believe 
it understood him mystically, and I figure his long 
white hand which seems to me, in my more jaundiced 
moments, to exist entirely for picking things and holding 
a lens patting its head, while the brute looked things 
unspeakable. . . . 

The botanist shakes his head after my explanation 
and says quietly " I do not like your Utopia, if thereji : 
are to be no dogs." 

Perhaps that makes me a little malicious. Indeec 
I do not hate dogs, but I care ten thousand times mort 
for a man than for all the brutes on the earth, and 
can see, what the botanist I think cannot, that a lif 
spent in the delightful atmosphere of many pet animal 
may have too dear a prict. . . . 

I find myself back again at the comparison of th 
botanist and myself. There is a profound different 
In our imaginations, and I wonder whether it is t 
consequence of innate character or ot training a 
: her he is really the human type or I. I am n 
altogether without imagination, but what imaginati Banafe 
I have has the most insistent disposition to sq ar 
itself with every fact in the universe. It hypot> sise ipei 

. boldly, but on the other hand it will nob ravel 
make believe. Now the botanist's imagination " 



'<e to 



:.- 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 



227 



usy with the most impossible make-believe. That is 
he way with all children I know. But it seems to 
ic one ought to pass out of it. It isn't as though the 
/orld was an untidy nursery ; it is a place of splen- 
ours indescribable for all who will lift its veils. It 
lay be he is essentially different from me, but I am 
mch more inclined to think he is simply more childish. 
Jways it is make-believe. He believes that horses are 
eautiful creatures for example, dogs are beautiful crea- 
ires, that some women are inexpressibly lovely, and 
2 makes believe that this is always so. Never a word 
[ criticism of horse or dog or woman ! Never a word 
c : criticism of his impeccable friends ! Then there is 
botany. He makes believe that all the vegetable 
ngdom is mystically perfect and exemplary, that all 
i|)wers smell deliciously and are exquisitely beautiful, 
tat Drosera does not hurt flies very much, and that 
lions do not smell. Most of the universe does not 
terest this nature lover at all. But I know, and I am 
lerulously incapable of understanding why everyone 
does not know, that a horse is beautiful in one way 
id quite ugly in another, that everything has this 
ot-silk quality, and is all the finer for that. When 
ople talk of a horse as an ugly animal I think of its 
njautiful moments, but when I hear a flow of indis- 
minate praise of its beauty I think of such an aspect 
arl one gets for example from a dog-cart, the fiddle- 
se'japed back, and that distressing blade of the neck, 
rel|3 narrow clumsy place between the ears, and the 
ly glimpse of cheek. There is, indeed, no beauty 



228 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

whatever save that transitory thing that comes and 
comes again ; all beauty is really the beauty of expres- 
sion, is really kinetic and momentary. That is true 
even of those triumphs of static endeavour achieved by 
Greece. The Greek temple, for example, is a barn with 
a face that at a certain angle of vision and in a certain 
light has a great calm beauty. 

But where are we drifting ? All such things, I hold, 
are cases of more and less, and of the right moment 
and the right aspect, even the things I most esteem. 
There is no perfection, there is no enduring treasure. 
This pet dog's beautiful affection, I say, or this other 
sensuous or imaginative delight, is no doubt good, 
but it can be put aside if it is incompatible with some 
other and wider good. You cannot focus all good things 
together. 

All right action and all wise action is surely sound 
judgment and courageous abandonment in the matter 
of such incompatibilities. If I cannot imagine thoughts 
and feelings in a dog's brain that cannot possibly be 
there, at least I can imagine things in the future of 
men that might be there had we the will to demand 
them. . . . 

" I don't like this Utopia," the botanist repeats. 
" You don't understand about dogs. To me they're 
human beings and more ! There used to be such a 
jolly old dog at my aunt's at Frognal when I was a 
boy " 

But I do not heed his anecdote. Something some- 
thing of the nature of conscience has suddenly jerked 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 229 

back the memory of that beer I drank at Hospenthal, 
and puts an accusing finger on the memory. 

I never have had a pet animal, I confess, though I 
have been fairly popular with kittens. But with regard 
to a certain petting of myself ? 

Perhaps I was premature about that beer. I have 
had no pet animals, but I perceive if the Modern Utopia 
is going to demand the sacrifice of the love of animals, 
which is, in its way, a very fine thing indeed, so much 
the more readily may it demand the sacrifice of many 
other indulgences, some of which are not even fine in 
the lowest degree. 

It is curious this haunting insistence upon sacrifice 
and discipline ! 

It is slowly becoming my dominant thought that 
the sort 01 people whose will this Utopia embodies 
must be people a little heedless of small pleasures. You 
Cjmnot focus all good things at the same time. That 
is my chief discovery in these meditations at Lucerne. 
Much of the rest of this Utopia I had in a sort of way 
anticipated, but not this. I wonder if I shall see my 
Utopian self for long and be able to talk to him freely. . . . 

We lie in the petal-strewn grass under some Judas 
trees beside the lake shore, as I meander among these 
thoughts, and each of us, disregardful of his companion, 
follows his own associations. 

" Very remarkable," I say, discovering that the 
botanist has come to an end with his story of that 
Frognal dog. 

" You'd wonder how he knew," he says. 



230 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" You would." 

I nibble a green blade. 

" Do you realise quite," I ask, " that within a week 
we shall face our Utopian selves and measure something 
of what we might have been ? " 

The botanist's face clouds. He rolls over, sits up 
abruptly and puts his lean hands about his knees. 

" I don't like to think about it," he says. " What 
is the good of reckoning . . . might have beens ? " 



5 

It is pleasant to think of one's puzzling the orga- 
nised wisdom of so superior a planet as this Utopia, 
this moral monster State my Frankenstein of reasoning 
has made, and to that pitch we have come. When 
we are next in the presence of our Lucerne official, he 
has the bearing of a man who faces a mystification 
beyond his powers, an incredible disarrangement of the 
order of Nature. Here, for the first time in the records 
of Utopian science, are two cases not simply one but 
two, and these in each other's company ! of dupli- 
cated thumb-marks. This, coupled with a cock-and-bull 
story of an instantaneous transfer from some planet 
unknown to Utopian astronomy. That he and all his 
world exists only upon a hypothesis that would explain 
every one of these difficulties absolutely, is scarcely 
likely to occur to his obviously unphilosophic mind. 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 231 

The official eye is more eloquent than the official 
lips and asks almost urgently, " What in this immeasur- 
able universe have you managed to do to your thumbs ? 
And why ? " But he is only a very inferior sort of 
official indeed, a mere clerk of the post, and he has 
all the guarded reserve of your thoroughly unoriginal 
man. " You are not the two persons I ascertained you 
were," he says, with the note of one resigned to com- 
munion with unreason ; " because you " he indicates 
me " are evidently at your residence in London." I 
smile. " That gentleman " he points a pen at the 
botanist in a manner that is intended to dismiss my 
smile once for all " will be in London next week. He 
will be returning next Friday from a special mission to 
investigate the fungoid parasites that have been attack- 
ing the cinchona trees in Ceylon." 

The botanist blesses his heart. 

" Consequently " the official sighs at the burthen 
of such nonsense, " you will have to go and consult 
with the people you ought to be." 

I betray a faint amusement. 

" You will have to end by believing in our planet," 
I say. 

He waggles a negation with his head. He would 
intimate his position is too responsible a one for jesting, 
and both of us in our several ways enjoy the pleasure 
we poor humans have in meeting with intellectual 
inferiority. " The Standing Committee of Identifi- 
cation," he says, with an eye on a memorandum, " has 
remitted your case to the Research Professor of Anthro- 



232 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

pology in the University of London, and they want 
you to go there, if you will, and talk to him." 

" What else can we do ? " says the botanist. 

" There's no positive compulsion," he remarks, " but 

your work here will probably cease. Here " he 

pushed the neat slips of paper towards us " are your 
tickets for London, and a small but sufficient supply of 
money," he indicates two piles of coins and paper on 
either hand of him " for a day or so there." He 
proceeds in the same dry manner to inform us we are 
invited to call at our earliest convenience upon our 
doubles, and upon the Professor, who is to investigate 
our case. 

" And then ? " 

He pulls down the corners of his mouth in a wry 
deprecatory smile, eyes us obliquely under a crumpled 
brow, shrugs his shoulders, and shows us the palms of 
his hands. 

On earth, where there is nationality, this would 
have been a Frenchman the inferior sort of French- 
man the sort whose only happiness is in the routine 
security of Government employment. 



6 

London will be the first Utopian city centre we 
shall see. 

We shall nnd ourselves there with not a little amaz3~ 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 233 

ment. It will be our first experience of the swift long 
distance travel of Utopia, and I have an idea I know 
not why that we should make the journey by night. 
Perhaps I think so because the ideal of long-distance 
travel is surely a restful translation less suitable for 
the active hours. 

We shall dine and gossip and drink coffee at the 
pretty little tables under the lantern-lit trees, we shall 
visit the theatre, and decide to sup in the train, and 
so come at last to the station. There we shall find 
pleasant rooms with seats and books luggage all 
neatly elsewhere and doors that we shall imagine 
give upon a platform. Our cloaks and hats and such- 
like outdoor impedimenta will be taken in the hall and 
neatly labelled for London, we shall exchange our 
shoes for slippers there, and we shall sit down like 
men in a club. An officious little bell will presently 
call our attention to a label " London " on the door- 
way, and an excellent phonograph will enforce that 
notice with infinite civility. The doors will open, and 
we shall walk through into an equally comfortable 
gallery. 

" Where is the train for London ? " we shall ask 
a uniformed fellow Utopian. 

" This is the train for London," he will say. 

There will be a shutting of doors, and the botanist 
and I, trying not to feel too childish, will walk exploring 
through the capacious train. 

The resemblance to a club will strike us both. " A 
good club," the botanist will correct me. 

8a 



234 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

\Yhen one travels -beyond a certain speed, there is 
nothing but fatigue in looking out of a window, and 
this corridor train, twice the width of its poor terrestrial 
brother, will have no need of that distraction. The 
simple device of abandoning any but a few windows, 
and those set high, gives the wall space of the long 
corridors to books ; the middle part of the train is 
indeed a comfortable library with abundant armchairs 
and couches, each with its green-shaded light, and soft 
carpets upon the soundproof floor. Further on will 
be a news-room, with a noiseless but busy tape at one 
corner, printing off messages from the wires by the 
wayside, and further still, rooms for gossip and smoking, 
a billiard room, and the dining car. Behind we shall 
come to bedrooms, bathrooms, the hairdresser, and so 
forth. 

" When shall we start ? " I ask presently, as we 
return, rather like bashful yokels, to the library, and 
the old gentleman reading the Arabian Nights in the 
armchair in the corner glances up at me with a sudden 
curiosity. 

The botanist touches my arm and nods towards a 
pretty little lead-paned window, through which we see 
a village sleeping under cloudy moonlight go flashing 
by. Then a skylit lake, and then a string of swaying 
lights, gone with the leap of a camera shutter. 

Two hundred miles an hour ! 

We resort to a dignified Chinese steward and secure 
our berths. It is perhaps terrestrial of us that we do 
not think of reading the Utopian literature that lines 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 235 

the middle part of the train. I find a bed of the simple 
Utopian pattern, and lie for a time thinking quite 
tranquilly of this marvellous adventure. 

I wonder why it is that to lie securely in bed, with 
the light out, seems ever the same place, wherever in 
space one may chance to be ? And asleep, there is no 
space for us at all. I become drowsy and incoherent 
and metaphysical. . . . 

The faint and fluctuating drone of the wheels below 
the car, re-echoed by the flying track, is more per- 
ceptible now, but it is not unpleasantly loud, merely 
a faint tinting of the quiet. . . . 

No sea crossing breaks our journey ; there is nothing 
to prevent a Channel tunnel in that other planet ; and 
I wake in London. 

The train has been in London some time when I 
awake, for these marvellous Utopians have discovered 
that it is not necessary to bundle out passengers from 
a train in the small hours, simply because they have 
arrived. A Utopian train is just a peculiar kind of 
hotel corridor that flies about the earth while one sleeps. 



7 

How will a great city of Utopia strike us ? 

To answer that question well one must needs be 
artist and engineer, and I am neither. Moreover, one 
must employ words and phrases that do not exist, lor 



236 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

this world still does not dream of the things that may 
be done with thought and steel, when the engineer 
is sufficiently educated to be an artist, and the artistic 
intelligence has been quickened to the accomplishment 
of an engineer. How can one write of these things 
for a generation which rather admires that inconvenient 
and gawky muddle of ironwork and Flemish archi- 
tecture, the London Tower Bridge. When before this, 
temerarious anticipators have written of the mighty 
buildings that might someday be, the illustrator has 
blended with the poor ineffectual splutter of the author's 
words, his powerful suggestion that it amounted simply 
to something bulbous, florid and fluent in the vein of 
the onion, and L'Art Nouveau. But here, it may be, 
the illustrator will not intervene. 

Art has scarcely begun in the world. 

There have been a few forerunners and that is all. 
Leonardo, Michael Angelo ; how they would have 
exulted irt the liberties of steel ! There are no more 
pathetic documents in the archives of art than Leo- 
nardo's memoranda. In these, one sees him again and 
again reaching out as it were, with empty desirous hands, 
towards the unborn possibilities of the engineer. And 
Dtirer, too, was a Modern, with the same turn towards 
creative invention. In our times these men would have 
wanted to make viaducts, to bridge wild and inaccessible 
places, to cut and straddle great railways athwart the 
mountain masses of the world. You can see, time 
after time, in Diirer's work, as you can see in the imagi- 
nary architectural landscape of the Pompeian walls, 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 237 

the dream of structures, lighter and bolder than stone 
or brick can yield. . . . These Utopian town buildings 
will be the realisation of such dreams. 

Here will be one of the great meeting places of man- 
kind. Here I speak of Utopian London will be the 
traditional centre of one of the great races in the com- 
monalty of the World State and here will be its social 
and intellectual exchange. There will be a mighty 
University here, with thousands of professors and tens 
of thousands of advanced students, and here great jour- 
nals of thought and speculation, mature and splendid 
books of philosophy and science, and a glorious fabric 
of literature will be woven and shaped, and with a teem- 
ing leisureliness, put forth. Here will be stupendous 
libraries, and a mighty organisation of museums. About 
these centres will cluster a great swarm of people, and 
close at hand will be another centre, for I who am an 
Englishman must needs stipulate that Westminster shall 
still be a seat of world Empire, one of several seats, if 
you will where the ruling council of the world as- 
sembles. Then the arts will cluster round this city, as 
gold gathers about wisdom, and here Englishmen will 
weave into wonderful prose and beautiful rhythms and 
subtly atmospheric forms, the intricate, austere and 
courageous imagination of our race. 

One will come into this place as one comes into a 
noble mansion. They will have flung great arches and 
domes of glass above the wider spaces of the town, 
the slender beauty of the perfect metal-work far over- 
head will be softened to a fairy-like unsubstantiality by 



238 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

the mild London air. It will be the London air we 
know, clear of filth and all impurity, the same air that 
gives our October days their unspeakable clarity and 
makes every London twilight mysteriously beautiful. 
We shall go along avenues of architecture that will be 
emancipated from the last memories of the squat temple 
boxes of the Greek, the buxom curvatures of Rome ; 
the Goth in us will have taken to steel and countless 
new materials as kindly as once he took to stone. The 
gay and swiftly moving platforms of the public ways 
will go past on either hand, carrying sporadic groups 
of people, and very speedily we shall find ourselves in 
a sort of central space, rich with palms and flowering 
bushes and statuary. We shall look along an avenue 
of trees, down a wide gorge between the cliffs of crowded 
hotels the hotels that are still glowing with internal 
lights, to where the shining morning river streams 
dawnlit out to sea. 

Great multitudes of people will pass softly to and 
fro in this central space, beautiful girls and youths 
going to the University classes that are held in the 
stately palaces about us, grave and capable men and 
women going to their businesses, children meandering 
along to their schools, holiday makers, lovers, setting 
out upon a hundred quests ; and here we shall ask for 
the two we more particularly seek. A graceful little 
telephone kiosk will put us within reach of them, end 
with a queer sense of unreality I shall find myself talking 
to my Utopian twin. He has heard of me, he wants to see 
me and he gives me clear directions how to come to him. 



A FEW UTOPIAN IMPRESSIONS. 239 

I wonder if my own voice sounds like that. 

" Yes," I say, " then I will come as soon as we have 
been to our hotel." 

We indulge in no eloquence upon this remarkable 
occasion. Yet I feel an unusual emotional stir. I 
tremble greatly, and the telephonic mouthpiece rattles 
as I replace it. 

And thence the botanist and I walk on to the apart- 
ments that have been set aside for us, and into which 
the poor little rolls of the property that has accumu- 
lated about us in Utopia, our earthly raiment, and a 
change of linen and the like, have already been deliv- 
ered. As we go I find I have little to say to my com- 
panion, until presently I am struck by a transitory 
wonder that he should have so little to say to me. 

" I can still hardly realise," I say, " that I am going 
tc see myself as I might have been." 

" No," he says, and relapses at once into his own 
preoccupation. 

For a moment my wonder as to what he should be 
thinking about brings me near to a double self-forget- 
fulness. 

I realise we are at the entrance of our hotel before 
I can formulate any further remark. 

" This is the place," I say. 



CHAPTER THE EIGHTH 

MY UTOPIAN SELF 
I 

IT falls to few of us to interview our better selves. 
My Utopian self is, of course, my better self 
according to my best endeavours and I must confess 
myself fully alive to the difficulties of the situation. 
When I came to this Utopia I had no thought of any 
such intimate self-examination. 

The whole fabric of that other universe sways for 
a moment as I come into his room, into his clear and 
ordered work-room. I am trembling. A figure rather 
taller than myself stands against the light. 

He comes towards me, and I, as I advance to meet 
him, stumble against a chair. Then, still without a 
word, we are clasping hands. 

I stand now so that the light falls upon him, and 
I can see his face better. He is a little taller than I, 
younger looking and sounder looking ; he has missed 
an illness or so, and there is no scar over his eye. His 
training has been subtly finer than mine ; he has made 
himself a better face than mine. . . . These things I 



MY UTOPIAN SELF. 241 

might have counted upon. I can fancy he winces with 
a twinge of sympathetic understanding at my manifest 
inferiority. Indeed, I come, trailing clouds of earthly 
confusion and weakness ; I bear upon me all the defects 
of my world. He wears, I see, that white tunic with 
the purple band that I have already begun to consider 
the proper Utopian clothing for grave men, and his face 
is clean shaven. We forget to speak at first in the in- 
tensity of our mutual inspection. When at last I do gain 
my voice it is to say something quite different from the 
fine, significant openings of my premeditated dialogues. 

" You have a pleasant room," I remark, and look 
about a little disconcerted because there is no fire- 
place for me to put my back against, or hearthrug to 
stand upon. He pushes me a chair, into which I 
plump, and we hang over an immensity of conversa- 
tional possibilities. 

" I say," I plunge, " wha do you think of me ? You 
don't think I'm an impostor ? " 

" Not now that I have seen you. No." 

" Am I so like you ? " 

" Like me and your story exactly." 

" You haven't any doubt left ? " I ask. 

" Not in the least, since I saw you enter. You come 
trom the world beyond Sirius, twin to this. Eh ? " 

" And you don't want to know how I got here ? " 

" I've ceased even to wonder how / got here," he 
says, with a laugh that echoes mine. 

He leans back in his chair, and I in mine, and the 
absurd parody of our attitude strikes us both. 



242 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" Well ? " we say, simultaneously, and laugh together. 
I will confess this meeting is more difficult even than 
I anticipated. 



2 

Our conversation at that first encounter would do 
very little to develop the Modern Utopia in my mind. 
Inevitably, it would be personal and emotional. He 
would tell me how he stood in his world, and I how I 
stood in mine. I should have to tell him things, I 
should have to explain things . 

No, the conversation would contribute nothing to 
a modern Utopia. 

And so I leave it out. 

3 

But I should go back to my botanist in a state of 
emotional relaxation. At first I should not heed the 
fact that he, too, had been in some manner stirred. 
" I have seen him," I should say, needlessly, and seem 
to be on the verge of telling the untellable. Then I 
should fade off into : " It's the strangest thing." 

He would interrupt me with his own preoccupation 
" You know," he would say, " I've seen someone." 

I should pause and look at him. 

" She is in this world," he says. 

" Who is in this world ? " 



MY UTOPIAN SELF. 243 

" Mary ! " 

I have not heard her name before, but I understand, 
of course, at once. 

" I saw her," he explains. 

" Saw her ? " 

"I'm certain it was her. Certain. She was far 
away across those gardens near here and before I had 
recovered from my amazement she had gone ! But it 
was Mary." 

He takes my arm. " You know I did not under- 
stand this," he says. " I did not really understand 
that when you said Utopia, you meant I was to meet 
her in happiness." 

" I didn't." 

" It works out at that." 

" You haven't met her yet." 

" I shall. It makes everything different. To tell 
you the truth I've rather hated this Utopia of yours 
at times. You mustn't mind my saying it, but there's 
something of the Gradgrind " 

Probably I should swear at that. 

" What ? " he says. 

" Nothing." 

" But you spoke ? " 

" I was purring. I'm a Gradgrind it's quite right 
anything you can say about Herbert Spencer, vivi- 
sectors, materialistic Science or Atheists, applies with- 
out correction to me. Begbie away ! But now you think 
better of a modern Utopia ? Was the lady looking 
well ? " 



244 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" It was her real self. Yes. Not the broken woman 
I met in the real world." 

" And as though she was pining for you." 

He looks puzzled. 

" Look there ! " I say. 

He looks. 

We are standing high above the ground in the loggia 
into which our apartments open, and I point across 
the soft haze of the public gardens to a tall white mass 
of University buildings that rises with a free and fear- 
less gesture, to lift saluting pinnacles against the clear 
evening sky. " Don't you think that rather more 
beautiful than say our National Gallery ? " 

He looks at it critically. " There's a lot of metal 
in it," he objects. " What ? " 

I purred. " But, anyhow, whatever you can't see 
is that, you can, I suppose, see that it is different from 
anything in your world it lacks the kindly humanity 
of a red-brick Queen Anne villa residence, with its 
gables and bulges, and bow windows, and its stained 
glass fanlight, and so forth. It lacks the self-com- 
placent unreasonableness of Board of Works classicism. 
There's something in its proportions as though some- 
one with brains had taken a lot of care to get it quite 
right, someone who not only knew what metal can do, 
but what a University ought to be, somebody who had 
found the Gothic spirit enchanted, petrified, in a cathe- 
dral, and had set it free." 

" But what has this," he asks, " to do with her ? " 

" Very much," I say. " This is not the same world. 



MY UTOPIAN SELF. 245 

If she is here, she will be younger in spirit and wiser. 
She will be in many ways more refined " 

" No one " he begins, with a note of indignation. 

" No, no ! She couldn't be. I was wrong there. 
But she will be different. Grant that at any rate. 
When you go forward to speak to her, she may not 
remember very many things you may remember. 
Things that happened at Frognal dear romantic walks 
through the Sunday summer evenings, practically you 
two alone, you in your adolescent silk hat and your 
nice gentlemanly gloves. . . . Perhaps that did not 
happen here ! And she may have other memories of 
things that down there haven't happened. You 
noted her costume. She wasn't by any chance one of 
the samurai ? " 

He answers, with a note of satisfaction, " No ! She 
wore a womanly dress of greyish green." 

" Probably under the Lesser Rule." 

" I don't know what you mean by the Lesser Rule. 
She wasn't one of the samurai." 

" And, after all, you know I keep on reminding 
you, and you keep on losing touch with the fact, that 
this world contains your double." 

He pales, and his countenance is disturbed. Thank 
Heaven, I've touched him at last ! 

" This world contains your double. But, conceiv- 
ably, everything may be different here. The whole 
romantic story may have run a different course. It was 
as it was in our world, by the accidents of custom and 
proximity. Adolescence is a defenceless plastic period. 



246 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

You are a man to form great affections, noble, great 
affections. You might have met anyone almost at 
that season and formed the same attachment." 

For a time he is perplexed and troubled by this 
suggestion. 

"No," he says, a little doubtfully. "No. It was 
herself." . . . Then, emphatically, " No ! " 



4 

For a time we say no more, and I fall musing about 
my strange encounter with my Utopian double. I 
think of the confessions I have just made to him, the 
strange admissions both to him and myself. I have 
stirred up the stagnations of my own emotional life, 
the pride that has slumbered, the hopes and disappoint- 
ments that have not troubled me for years. There 
are things that happened to me in my adolescence 
that no discipline of reason will ever bring to a just 
proportion for me, the first humiliations I was made 
to suffer, the waste of all the fine irrecoverable loyalties 
and passions of my youth. The dull base caste of my 
little personal tragi-comedy I have ostensibly for- 
given, I have for the most part forgotten and yet 
when I recall them I hate each actor still. Whenever 
it comes into my mind I do my best to prevent it 
there it is, and these detestable people blot out the 
stars for me. 



MY UTOPIAN SELF. 247 

I have told all that story to my double, and he has 
listened with understanding eyes. But for a little while 
those squalid memories will not sink back into the deeps. 

We lean, side by side, over our balcony, lost in such 
egotistical absorptions, quite heedless of the great palace 
of noble dreams to which our first enterprise has 
brought us. 



5 

I can understand the botanist this afternoon ; for 
once we are in the same key. My own mental temper 
has gone for the day, and I know what it means to 
be untempered. Here is a world and a glorious world, 
and it is for me to take hold of it, to have to do with 
it, here and now, and behold ! I can only think that 
I am burnt and scarred, and there rankles that wretched 
piece of business, the mean unimaginative triumph of 
my antagonist 

I wonder how many men have any real freedom of 
mind, are, in truth, unhampered by such associations, 
to whom all that is great and noble in life does not, at 
times at least, if not always, seem secondary to obscure 
rivalries and considerations, to the petty hates that are 
like germs in the blood, to the lust for self-assertion, to 
dwarfish pride, to affections they gave in pledge even 
before they were men. 

The botanist beside me dreams, I know, of vindi- 
cations for that woman. 



248 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

All this world before us, and its order and liberty, 
are no more than a painted scene before which he is 
to meet Her at last, freed from " that scoundrel." 

He expects " that scoundrel " really to be present 
and, as it were, writhing under their feet. . . . 

I wonder if that man was a scoundrel. He has gone 
wrong on earth, no doubt, has failed and degenerated, 
but what was it sent him wrong ? Was his failure 
inherent, or did some net of cross purposes tangle about 
his feet ? Suppose he is not a failure in Utopia ! . . . 

I wonder that this has never entered the botanist's 
head. 

He, with his vaguer mind, can overlook spite of 
my ruthless reminders all that would mar his vague 
anticipations. That, too, if I suggested it, he would 
overcome and disregard. He has the most amazing 
power of resistance to uncongenial ideas ; amazing 
that is, to me. He hates the idea of meeting his double, 
and consequently so soon as I cease to speak of that, 
with scarcely an effort of his will it fades again from 
his mind. 

Down below in the gardens two children pursue one 
another, and one, near caught, screams aloud and rouses 
me from my reverie. 

I follow their little butterfly antics until they vanish 
beyond a thicket of flowering rhododendra, and then 
my eyes go back to the great fagade of the University 
buildings. 

But I am in no mood to criticise architecture. 

Why should a modern Utopia insist upon slipping 



MY UTOPIAN SELF. 249 

out of the hands of its creator and becoming the back- 
ground of a personal drama of such a silly little 
drama ? 

The botanist will not see Utopia in any other way. 
He tests it entirely by its reaction upon the individual 
persons and things he knows ; he dislikes it because 
he suspects it of wanting to lethal chamber his aunt's 
" dear old doggie," and now he is reconciled to it be- 
cause a certain " Mary " looks much younger and better 
here than she did on earth. And here am I, near fallen 
into the same way of dealing ! 

We agreed to purge this State and all the people 
in it of traditions, associations, bias, laws, and artificial 
entanglements, and begin anew ; but we have no power 
to liberate ourselves. Our past, even its accidents, its 
accidents above all, and ourselves, are one. 



CHAPTER THE NINTH 

THE SAMURAI 
I 

NEITHER my Utopian double nor I love emotion 
sufficiently to cultivate it, and my feelings are in 
a state of seemly subordination when we meet again. 
He is now in possession of some clear, general ideas 
about my own world, and I can broach almost at once 
the thoughts that have been growing and accumulating 
since my arrival in this planet of my dreams. We find 
our interest in a humanised state-craft, makes us, in 
spite of our vast difference in training and habits, 
curiously akin. 

I put it to him that I came to Utopia with but very 
vague ideas of the method of government, biassed, 
perhaps, a little in favour of certain electoral devices, 
but for the rest indeterminate, and that I have come 
to perceive more and more clearly that the large in- 
tricacy of Utopian organisation demands more power- 
ful and efficient method of control than electoral methods 
can give. I have come to distinguish among the varied 
costumes and the innumerable types of personality 



THE SAMURAI. 251 

Utopia presents, certain men and women of a distinctive 
costume and bearing, and I know now that these people 
constitute an order, the samurai, the " voluntary 
nobility," which is essential in the scheme of the Utopian 
State. I know that this order is open to every physic- 
ally and mentally healthy adult in the Utopian State 
who will observe its prescribed austere rule of living, 
that much of the responsible work of the State is re- 
served for it, and I am inclined now at the first onset 
of realisation to regard it as far more significant than 
it really is in the Utopian scheme, as being, indeed, 
in itself and completely the Utopian scheme. My 
predominant curiosity, concerns the organisation of this 
order. As it has developed in my mind, it has re- 
minded me more and more closely of that strange 
class of guardians which constitutes the essential sub- 
stance of Plato's Republic, and it is with an implicit 
reference to Plato's profound intuitions that I and my 
double discuss this question. 

To clarify our comparison he tells me something 
of the history of Utopia, and incidentally it becomes 
necessary to make a correction in the assumptions 
upon which I have based my enterprise. We are 
assuming a world identical in every respect with the 
real planet Earth, except for the profoundest differences 
in the mental content of life. This implies a different 
literature, a different philosophy, and a different history, 
and so soon as I come to talk to him I find that 
though it remains unavoidable that we should assume 
the correspondence of the two populations, man for 



252 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

man unless we would face unthinkable complications 
we must assume also that a great succession of 
persons of extraordinary character and mental gifts, 
who on earth died in childhood or at birth, or who 
never learnt to read, or who lived and died amidst 
savage or brutalising surroundings that gave their 
gifts no scope, did in Utopia encounter happier chances, 
and take up the development and application of social 
theory from the time of the first Utopists in a steady 
onward progress down to the present hour.* The 
differences of condition, therefore, had widened with 
each successive year. Jesus Christ had been bcrn into 
a liberal and progressive Roman Empire that spread 
from the Arctic Ocean to the Bight of Benin, and was 
to know no Decline and Fall, and Mahomet, instead of 
embodying the dense prejudices of Arab ignorance, 
opened his eyes upon an intellectual horizon already 
nearly as wide as the world. 

And through this empire the flow of thought, the 
flow of intention, poured always more abundantly. 
There were wars, but they were conclusive wars that 
established new and more permanent relations, that 
swept aside obstructions, and abolished centres of decay \ 
there were prejudices tempered to an ordered criticism, 
and hatreds that merged at last in tolerant reactions. 
It \vas several hundred years ago that the great organisa- 

* One might assume as an alternative to this that amidst the four- 
fifths of the Greek literature now lost to the world, there perished, 
neglected, some book of elementary significance, some earlier Novum 
Organ urn, that in Utopia survived to achieve the profoundest con- 
sequences. 



THE SAMURAI. 253 

tion of the samurai came into its present form. And 
it was this organisation's widely sustained activities that 
had shaped and established the World State in Utopia. 
This organisation of the samurai was a quite de- 
liberate invention. It arose in the course of social and 
political troubles and complications, analogous to those 
of our own time on earth, and was, indeed, the last of 
a number of political and religious experiments dating 
back to the first dawn of philosophical state-craft in 
Greece. That hasty despair of specialisation for govern- 
ment that gave our poor world individualism, democratic 
liberalism, and anarchism, and that curious disregard of 
the fund of enthusiasm and self-sacrifice in men, which 
is the fundamental weakness of worldly economics, do 
not appear in the history of Utopian thought. All 
that history is pervaded with the recognition of the 
fact that self-seeking is no more the whole of human 
life than the satisfaction of hunger ; that it is an essen- 
tial of a man's existence no doubt, and that under stress 
of evil circumstances it may as entirely obsess him as 
would the food hunt during famine, but that life may 
pass beyond to an illimitable world of emotions and 
effort. Every sane person consists of possibilities 
beyond the unavoidable needs, is capable of disinterested 
feeling, even if it amounts only to enthusiasm for a 
sport or an industrial employment well done, for an 
art, or for a locality or class. In our world now, as in 
the Utopian past, this impersonal energy of a man goes 
out into religious emotion and work, into patriotic 
effort, into artistic enthusiasms, into games and amateur 



2 54 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

employments, and an enormous proportion of the whole 
world's fund of effort wastes itself in religious and 
political misunderstandings and conflicts, and in un- 
satisfying amusements and unproductive occupations. 
In a modern Utopia there will, indeed, be no perfection ; 
in Utopia there must also be friction, conflicts and 
waste, but the waste will be enormously less than in 
our world. And the co-ordination of activities this 
relatively smaller waste will measure, will be the achieved 
end for which the order of the samurai was first devised. 

Inevitably such an order must have first arisen 
among a clash of social forces and political systems as 
a revolutionary organisation. It must have set before 
itself the attainment of some such Utopian ideal as 
this modern Utopia does, in the key of mortal im- 
perfection, realise. At first it may have directed itself 
to research and discussion, to the elaboration of its 
ideal, to the discussion of a plan of campaign, but 
at some stage it must have assumed a more militant 
organisation, and have prevailed against and assimilated 
the pre-existing political organisations, and to all in- 
tents and purposes have become this present synthesised 
World State. Traces of that militancy would, therefore, 
pervade it still, and a campaigning quality no longer 
against specific disorders, but against universal human 
weaknesses, and the inanimate forces that trouble man 
still remain as its essential quality. 

" Something of this kind," I should tell my double, 
" had arisen in our thought " I jerk my head back to 
indicate an infinitely distant planet " just before I 



THE SAMURAI. 255 

came upon these explorations. The idea had reached 
me, for example, of something to be called a New 
Republic, which was to be in fact an organisation for 
revolution something after the fashion of your samurai, 
as I understand them only most of the organisation 
and the rule of life still remained to be invented. All 
sorts of people were thinking of something in that way 
about the time of my coming. The idea, as it reached 
me, was pretty crude in several respects. It ignored 
the high possibility of a synthesis of languages in the 
future ; it came from a literary man, who wrote only 
English, and, as I read him he was a little vague in 
his proposals it was to be a purely English-speaking 
movement. And his ideas were coloured too much by 
the peculiar opportunism of his time ; he seemed to have 
more than half an eye for a prince or a millionaire of 
genius ; he seemed looking here and there for support 
and the structural elements of a party. Still, the idea 
of a comprehensive movement of disillusioned and 
illuminated men behind the shams and patriotisms, 
the spites and personalities of the ostensible world was 
there." 

I added some particulars. 

" Our movement had something of that spirit in 
the beginning," said my Utopian double. " But while 
your men seem to be thinking disconnectedly, and upon 
a very narrow and fragmentary basis of accumulated 
conclusions, ours had a fairly comprehensive science of 
human association, and a very careful analysis of the 
failures of preceding beginnings to draw upon. After 



256 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

all, your world must be as full as ours was cf the 
wreckage and decay of previous attempts; churches, 
aristocracies, orders, cults. ..." 

" Only at present we seem to have lost heart alto- 
gether, and now there are no new religions, no new 
orders, no new cults no beginnings any more." 

" But that's only a resting phase, perhaps. You 
were saying " 

" Oh ! let that distressful planet alone for a time ! 
Tell me how you manage in Utopia." 



2 

The social theorists of Utopia, my double explained, 
did not base their schemes upon the classification of 
men into labour and capital, the landed interest, the 
liquor trade, and the like. They esteemed these as 
accidental categories, indefinitely amenable to states- 
manship, and they looked for some practical and real 
classification upon which to base organisation.* But, 
on the other hand, the assumption that men are un- 
classifiable, because practically homogeneous, which 
underlies modern democratic methods and all the 

* In that they seem to have profited by a more searching criti- 
cism of early social and political speculations than our earth has yet 
undertaken. The social speculations of the Greeks, for example, had 
just the same primary defect as the economic speculations of the 
eighteenth century they began with the assumption that the general 
conditions of the prevalent state of affairs were permanent. 



THE SAMURAI. 257 

fallacies of our equal justice, is even more alien to the 
Utopian mind. Throughout Utopia there is, of course, 
no other than provisional classifications, since every 
being is regarded as finally unique, but for political 
and social purposes things have long rested upon a 
classification of temperaments, which attends mainly to 
differences in the range and quality and character of 
the individual imagination. 

This Utopian classification was a rough one, but it 
served its purpose to determine the broad lines of 
political organisation ; it was so far unscientific that 
many individuals fall between or within two or even 
three of its classes. But that was met by giving the 
correlated organisation a compensatory looseness of 
play. Four main classes of mind were distinguished, 
called, respectively, the Poietic, the Kinetic, the Dull, 
and the Base. The former two are supposed to con- 
stitute the living tissue of the State ; the latter are 
the fulcra and resistances, the bone and cover of its 
body. They are not hereditary classes, nor is there any 
attempt to develop any class by special breeding, simply 
because the intricate interplay of heredity is untraceable 
and incalculable. They are classes to which people 
drift of their own accord. Education is uniform until 
differentiation becomes unmistakable, and each man 
(and woman) must establish his position with regard 
to the lines of this abstract classification by his own 
quality, choice, and development. . . . 

The Poietic or creative class of mental individuality 
embraces a wide range of types, but they agree in 

9 



258 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

possessing imaginations that range beyond the known 
and accepted, and that involve the desire to bring the 
discoveries made in such excursions, into knowledge 
and recognition. The scope and direction of the 
imaginative excursion may vary very greatly. It may 
be the invention of something new or the discovery of 
something hitherto unperceived. When the invention 
or discovery is primarily beauty then we have the 
artistic type of Poietic mind ; when it is not so, we 
have the true scientific man. The range of discovery 
may be narrowed as it is in the art of Whistler or the 
science of a cytologist, or it may embrace a wide extent 
of relevance, until at last both artist or scientific in- 
quirer merge in the universal reference of the true 
philosopher. To the accumulated activities of the 
Poietic type, reacted upon by circumstances, are due 
almost all the forms assumed by human thought and 
feeling. All religious ideas, all ideas of what is good 
or beautiful, entered life through the poietic inspirations 
of man. Except for processes of decay, the forms of 
the human future must come also through men of this 
same type, and it is a primary essential to our modern 
idea of an abundant secular progress that these activi- 
ties should be unhampered and stimulated. 

The Kinetic class consists of types, various, of course, 
and merging insensibly along the boundary into the 
less representative constituents of the Poietic group, 
but distinguished by a more restricted range of imagina- 
tion. Their imaginations do not range beyond the 
known, experienced, and accepted, though within these 



THE SAMURAI. 259 

limits they may imagine as vividly or more vividly 
than members of the former group. They are often 
very clever and capable people, but they do not do, 
and they do not desire to do, new things. The more 
vigorous individuals of this class are the most teachable 
people in the world, and they are generally more moral 
and more trustworthy than the Poietic types. They 
live, while the Poietics are always something of experi- 
mentalists with life. The characteristics of either of 
these two classes may be associated with a good or 
bad physique, with excessive or defective energy, with 
exceptional keenness of the senses in some determinate 
direction or such-like " bent," and the Kinetic type, just 
as the Poietic type, may display an imagination of 
restricted or of the most universal range. But a fairly 
energetic Kinetic is probably the nearest thing to that 
ideal our earthly anthropologists have in mind when 
they speak of the " Normal " human being. The very 
definition of the Poietic class involves a certain ab- 
normality. 

The Utopians distinguished two extremes of this 
Kinetic class according to the quality of their imagina- 
tive preferences, the Dan and Beersheba, as it were, 
of this division. At one end is the mainly intellectual, 
unoriginal type, which, with energy of personality, 
makes an admirable judge or administrator and without 
it an uninventive, laborious, common mathematician, 
or common scholar, or common scientific man ; while 
at the other end is the mainly emotional, unoriginal 
man, the type to which at a low level of personal 



26o A MODERN UTOPIA. 

energy my botanist inclines. The second type in- 
cludes, amidst its energetic forms, great actors, and 
popular politicians and preachers. Between these 
extremes is a long and wide region of varieties, into 
which one would put most of the people who form the 
reputable workmen, the men of substance, the trust- 
worthy men and women, the pillars of society on earth. 

Below these two classes in the Utopian scheme of 
things, and merging insensibly into them, come the 
Dull. The Dull are persons of altogether inadequate 
imagination, the people who never seem to learn 
thoroughly, or hear distinctly, or think clearly. (I 
believe if everyone is to be carefully educated they 
would be considerably in the minority in the world, 
but it is quite possible that will not be the reader's 
opinion. It is clearly a matter of an arbitrary line.) 
They are the stupid people, the incompetent people, 
the formal, imitative people, the people who, in any 
properly organised State, should, as a class, gravitate 
towards and below the minimum wage that qualifies 
for marriage. The laws of heredity are far too mysterious 
for such offspring as they do produce to be excluded 
from a fair chance in the world, but for themselves, 
they count neither for work nor direction in the State. 

Finally, with a bold disregard of the logician's classi- 
ficatory rules, these Utopian statesmen who devised 
the World State, hewed out in theory a class of the 
Base. The Base may, indeed, be either poietic, kinetic, 
or dull, though most commonly they are the last, and 
their definition concerns not so much the quality of 



THE SAMURAI. 261 

their imagination as a certain bias in it, that to a states- 
man makes it a matter for special attention. The Base 
have a narrower and more persistent egoistic refer- 
ence than the common run of humanity ; they may 
boast, but they have no frankness ; they have relatively 
great powers of concealment, and they are capable of, 
and sometimes have an aptitude and inclination towards, 
cruelty. In the queer phrasing of earthly psychology 
with its clumsy avoidance of analysis, they have no 
" moral sense." They count as an antagonism to the 
State organisation. 

Obviously, this is the rudest of classifications, and 
no Utopian has ever supposed it to be a classification 
for individual application, a classification so precise 
that one can say, this man is " poietic," and that man 
is " base." In actual experience these qualities mingle 
and vary in every possible way. It is not a classification 
for Truth, but a classification to an end. Taking 
humanity as a multitude of unique individuals in mass, 
one may, for practical purposes, deal with it far more 
conveniently by disregarding its uniquenesses and its 
mixed cases altogether, and supposing it to be an 
assembly of poietic, kinetic, dull, and base people. In 
many respects it behaves as if it were that. The State, 
dealing as it does only with non-individualised affairs, is 
not only justified in disregarding, but is bound to dis- 
regard, a man's special distinction, and to provide for 
him on the strength of his prevalent aspect as being 
on the whole poietic, kinetic, or what not. In a world 
of hasty judgments and carping criticism, it cannot be 



262 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

repeated too often that the fundamental ideas of a 
modern Utopia imply everywhere and in everything, 
margins and elasticities, a certain universal compensatory 
looseness of play. 



3- 

Now these Utopian statesmen who founded the 
World State put the problem of social organisation 
in the following fashion : To contrive a revolutionary 
movement that shall absorb all existing governments 
and fuse them with itself, and that must be rapidly 
progressive and adaptable, and yet coherent, persistent, 
powerful, and efficient. 

The problem of combining progress with political 
stability had never been accomplished in Utopia before 
that time, any more than it has been accomplished on 
earth. Just as on earth, Utopian history was a succes- 
sion of powers rising and falling in an alternation of 
efficient conservative with unstable liberal States, just 
as on earth, so in Utopia, the kinetic type of men had 
displayed a more or less unintentional antagonism to 
the poietic. The general life-history of a State had been 
the same on either planet. First, through poietic 
activities, the idea of a community has developed, and 
the State has shaped itself ; poietic men have arisen 
first in this department of national life, and then that, 
and have given place to kinetic men of a high type 
for it seems to be in their nature that poietic men 



THE SAMURAI. 263 

should be mutually repulsive, and not succeed and 
develop one another consecutively and a period of 
expansion and vigour has set in. The general poietic 
activity has declined with the development of an efficient 
and settled social and political organisation ; the states- 
man has given way to the politician who has incorporated 
the wisdom of the statesman with his own energy, the 
original genius in arts, letters, science, and every de- 
partment of activity to the cultivated and scholarly 
man. The kinetic man of wide range, who has assimi- 
lated his poietic predecessor, succeeds with far more 
readiness than his poietic contemporary in almost every 
human activity. The latter is by his very nature un- 
disciplined and experimental, and is positively hampered 
by precedents and good order. With this substitution 
of the efficient for the creative type, the State ceases 
to grow, first in this department of activity, and then in 
that, and so long as its conditions remain the same it 
remains orderly and efficient. But it has lost its power 
of initiative and change ; its power of adaptation is gone, 
and with that secular change of conditions which is the 
law of life, stresses must arise within and without, and 
bring at last either through revolution or through 
defeat the release of fresh poietic power. The process, 
of course, is not in its entirety simple ; it may be 
masked by the fact that one department of activity 
may be in its poietic stage, while another is in a phase 
of realisation. In the United States of America, for 
example, during the nineteenth century, there was great 
poietic activity in industrial organisation, and none 



V 



264 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

whatever in political philosophy ; but a careful analysis 
of the history of any period will show the rhythm 
almost invariably present, and the initial problem 
before the Utopian philosopher, therefore, was whether 
this was an inevitable alternation, whether human 
progress was necessarily a series of developments, 
collapses, and fresh beginnings, after an interval of 
disorder, unrest, and often great unhappiness, or 
whether it was possible to maintain a secure, happy, 
and progressive State beside an unbroken flow of poietic 
activity. 

Clearly they decided upon the second alternative. 
If, indeed, I am listening to my Utopian self, then they 
not only decided the problem could be solved, but 
they solved it. 

He tells me how they solved it. 

A modern Utopia differs from all the older Utopias 
in its recognition of the need of poietic activities one 
sees this new consideration creeping into thought for 
the first time in the phrasing of Comte's insistence 
that " spiritual " must precede political reconstruction, 
and in his admission of the necessity of recurrent books 
and poems about Utopias and at first this recognition 
appears to admit only an added complication to a 
problem already unmanageably complex. Comte's 
separation of the activities of a State into the spiritual 
and material does, to a certain extent, anticipate this 
opposition of poietic and kinetic, but the intimate 
texture of his mind was dull and hard, the conception 
slipped from him again, and his suppression of literary 



THE SAMURAI. 265 

activities, and his imposition of a rule of life upon 
the poietic types, who are least able to sustain it, 
mark how deeply he went under. To a large extent 
he followed the older Utopists in assuming that the 
philosophical and constructive problem could be done 
once for all, and he worked the results out simply 
under an organised kinetic government. But what 
seems to be merely an addition to the difficulty may 
in the end turn out to be a simplification, just as the 
introduction of a fresh term to an intricate irreducible 
mathematical expression will at times bring it to unity. 
Now philosophers after my Utopian pattern, who 
find the ultimate significance in life in individuality, 
novelty and the undefined, would not only regard the 
poietic element as the most important in human society, 
but would perceive quite clearly the impossibility of 
its organisation. This, indeed, is simply the application 
to the moral and intellectual fabric of the principles 
already applied in discussing the State control of re- 
production (in Chapter the Sixth, 2). But just as 
in the case of births it was possible for the State to 
frame limiting conditions within which individuality 
plays more freely than in the void, so the founders 
of this modern Utopia believed it possible to define 
conditions under which every individual born with 
poietic gifts should 'be enabled and encouraged to give 
them a full development, in art, philosophy, invention, 
or discovery. Certain general conditions presented 
themselves as obviously reasonable : to give every 
citizen as good an education as he or she could acauire. 

ga 



266 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

for example ; to so frame it that the directed educa- 
tional process would never at any period occupy the 
whole available time of the learner, but would provide 
throughout a marginal free leisure with opportunities for 
developing idiosyncrasies, and to ensure by the ex- 
pedient of a minimum wage for a specified amount of 
work, that leisure and opportunity did not cease through- 
out life. 

But, in addition to thus making poietic activities 
universally possible, the founders of this modern Utopia 
sought to supply incentives, which was an altogether 
more difficult research, a problem in its nature irre- 
solvably complex, and admitting of no systematic 
solution. But my double told me of a great variety 
of devices by which poietic men and women were given 
honour and enlarged freedoms, so soon as they pro- 
duced an earnest of their quality, and he explained 
to me how great an ambition they might entertain. 

There were great systems of laboratories attached 
to every municipal force station at which research 
could be conducted under the most favourable con- 
ditions, and every mine, and, indeed, almost every 
great industrial establishment, w T as saddled under its 
lease with similar obligations. So much for poietic 
ability and research in physical science. The World 
State tried the claims of every living contributor to 
my materially valuable invention, and paid or charged 
a royalty on its use that went partly to him personally, 
and partly to the research institution that had pro- 
duced him. In the matter of literature and the philo- 



THE SAMURAI. 267 

sophical and sociological sciences, every higher educa- 
tional establishment carried its studentships, its fellow- 
ships, its occasional lectureships, and to produce a 
poem, a novel, a speculative work of force or merit, 
was to become the object of a generous competition 
between rival Universities. In Utopia, any author has 
the option either of publishing his works through the 
public bookseller as a private speculation, or, if he is 
of sufficient merit, of accepting a University endowment 
and conceding his copyright to the University press. 
All sorts of grants in the hands of committees of the 
most varied constitution, supplemented these academic 
resources, and ensured that no possible contributor to 
the wide flow of the Utopian mind slipped into neglect. 
Apart from those who engaged mainly in teaching and 
administration, my double told me that the world- wide 
House of Saloman * thus created sustained over a 
million men. For all the rarity of large fortunes, there- 
fore, no original man with the desire and capacity for 
material or mental experiments went long without 
resources and the stimulus of attention, criticism, and 
rivalry. 

" And finally," said my double, " our Rules ensure 
a considerable understanding of the importance of 
poietic activities in the majority of the samurai, in 
whose hands as a class all the real power of the world 
resides." 

" Ah ! " said I, " and now we come to the thing 
that interests me most. For it is quite clear, in my 

* The New Atlantis. 



268 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

mind, that these samurai form the real body of the 
State. All this time that I have spent going to and 
for in this planet, it has been -growing upon me that 
this order of men and women, wearing such a uniform 
as you wear, and with faces strengthened by discipline 
and touched with devotion, is the Utopian reality ; 
but that for them, the whole fabric of these fair ap- 
pearances would crumble and tarnish, shrink and shrivel, 
until at last, back I should be amidst the grime and 
disorders of the life of earth. Tell me about these 
samurai, who remind me of Plato's guardians, who 
look like Knights Templars, who bear a name that 
recalls the swordsmen of Japan . . . and whose uniform 
you yourself are wearing. What are they ? Are they 
an hereditary caste, a specially educated order, an elected 
class ? For, certainly, this world turns upon them as 
a door upon its hinges." 



4 

" I follow the Common Rule, as many men do," 
said my double, answering my allusion to his uniform 
almost apologetically. " But my own work is, in its 
nature, poietic ; there is much dissatisfaction with our 
isolation of criminals upon islands, and I am analysing 
the psychology of prison officials and criminals in 
general with a view to some better scheme. I am sup- 
posed to be ingenious with expedients in this direction. 
Typically, the samurai are engaged in administrative 



THE SAMURAI. 269 

work. Practically the whole of the responsible rule 
of the world is in their hands ; all our head teachers 
and disciplinary heads of colleges, our judges, barristers, 
employers of labour beyond a certain limit, practising 
medical men, legislators, must be sarmtrai, and all the 
executive committees, and so forth, that play so large 
a part in our affairs are drawn by lot exclusively from 
them. The order is not hereditary we know just 
enough of biology and the uncertainties of inheritance 
to know how silly that would be and it does not require 
an early consecration or novitiate or ceremonies and 
initiations of that sort. The samurai are, in fact, 
volunteers. Any intelligent adult in a reasonably 
healthy and efficient state may, at any age after five- 
and-twenty, become one of the samurai, and take a hand 
in the universal control." 

" Provided he follows the Rule." 
" Precisely provided he follows the Rule." 
" I have heard the phrase, ' voluntary nobility.' ' 
" That was the idea of our Founders. They made 
a noble and privileged order open to the whole world. 
No one could complain of an unjust exclusion, for the 
only thing that could exclude from the order was un- 
willingness or inability to follow the Rule." 

" But the Rule might easily have been made ex- 
clusive of special lineages and races." 

" That wasn't their intention. The Rule was planned 
to exclude the dull, to be unattractive to the base, 
and to direct and co-ordinate all sound citizens of good 
intent." 



270 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" And it has succeeded ? " 

" As well as anything finite can. Life is still im- 
perfect, still a thick felt of dissatisfactions and perplex- 
ing problems, but most certainly the quality of all its 
problem, has been raised, and there has been no war, 
no grinding poverty, not half the disease, and an enor- 
mous increase of the order, beauty, and resources of 
life since the samurai, who began as a private aggressive 
cult, won their way to the rule of the world." 

" I would like to have that history," I said. " I 
expect there was fighting ? " He nodded. " But first 
tell me about the Rule." 

" The Rule aims to exclude the dull and base alto- 
gether, to discipline the impulses and emotions, to de- 
velop a moral habit and sustain a man in periods of 
stress, fatigue, and temptation, to produce the maxi- 
mum co-operation of all men of good intent, and, in 
fact, to keep all the samurai in a state of moral and 
bodily health and efficiency. It does as much of this as 
well as it can, but, of course, like all general propositions, 
it does not do it in any case with absolute precision. 
On the whole, it is so good that most men who, like 
myself, are doing poietic work, and who would be just 
as well off without obedience, find a satisfaction in ad- 
hesion. At first, in the militant days, it was a trifle 
hard and uncompromising ; it had rather too strong 
an appeal to the moral prig and harshly righteous man, 
but it has undergone, and still undergoes, revision and 
expansion, and every year it becomes a little better 
adapted to the need of a general rule of life that all 



THE SAMURAI. 271 

men may try to follow. We have now a whole litera- 
ture, with many very fine things in it, written about 
the Rule." 

He glanced at a little book on his desk, took it up 
as if to show it me, then put it down again. 

" The Rule consists of three parts ; there is the list 
of things that qualify, the list of things that must not 
be done, and the list of things that must be done. Quali- 
fication exacts a little exertion, as evidence of good 
faith, and it is designed to weed out the duller dull and 
many of the base. Our schooling period ends now about 
fourteen, and a small number of boys and girls about 
three per cent. are set aside then as unteachable, as, in 
fact, nearly idiotic ; the rest go on to a college or upper 
school." 

" All your population ? " 

" With that exception." 

" Free ? " 

" Of course. And they pass out- of college at eighteen. 
There are several different college courses, but one or 
other must be followed and a satisfactory examination 
passed at the end perhaps ten per cent, fail and the 
Rule requires that the candidate for the samurai must 
have passed." 

" But a very good man is sometimes an idle school- 
boy." 

" We admit that. And so anyone who has failed to 
pass the college leaving examination may at any time 
in later life sit for it again and again and again. Cer- 
tain carefully specified things excuse it altogether." 



272 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" That makes it fair. But aren't there people who 
cannot pass examinations ? " 

" People of nervous instability " 

" But they may be people of great though irregular 
poietic gifts." 

" Exactly. That is quite possible. But we don't 
want that sort of people among our samurai. Passing 
an examination is a proof of a certain steadiness of 
purpose, a certain self-control and submission " 

" Of a certain ' ordinariness.' ' 

" Exactly what is wanted." 

" Of course, those others can follow other careers." 

" Yes. That's what we want them to do. And, 
besides these two educational qualifications, there are 
two others of a similar kind of more debateable value. 
One is practically not in operation now. Our Founders 
put it that a candidate for the samurai must possess 
what they called a Technique, and, as it operated in the 
beginning, he had to hold the qualification for a doctor, 
for a lawyer, for a military officer, or an engineer, or 
teacher, or have painted acceptable pictures, or written 
a book, or something of the sort. He had, in fact, as 
people say, to ' be something,' or to have ' done some- 
thing.' It was a regulation of vague intention even in 
the beginning, and it became catholic to the pitch of 
absurdity. To play a violin skilfully has been accepted 
as sufficient for this qualification. There may have been 
a reason in the past for this provision ; in those days 
there were many daughters of prosperous parents and 
even some sons who did nothing whatever but idle un- 



THE SAMURAI. 273 

interestingly in the world, and the organisation might 
have suffered by their invasion, but that reason has gone 
now, and the requirement remains a merely ceremonial 
requirement. But, on the other hand, another has de- 
veloped. Our Founders made a collection of several 
volumes, which they called, collectively, the Book of 
the Samurai, a compilation of articles and extracts, 
poems and prose pieces, which were supposed to em- 
body the idea of the order. It was to play the part for 
the samurai that the Bible did for the ancient Hebrews. 
To tell you the truth, the stuff was of very unequal merit ; 
there was a lot of very second-rate rhetoric, and some 
nearly namby-pamby verse. There was also included 
some very obscure verse and prose that had the trick 
of seeming wise. But for all such defects, much of the 
Book, from the very beginning, was splendid and in- 
spiring matter. From that time to this, the Book of 
the Samurai has been under revision, much has been 
added, much rejected, and some deliberately rewritten. 
Now, there is hardly anything in it that is not beautiful 
and perfect in form. The whole range of noble emotions 
finds expression there, and all the guiding ideas of our 
Modern State. We have recently admitted some terse 
criticism of its contents by a man named Henley." 

" Old Henley ! " 

" A man who died a little time ago." 

" I knew that man on earth. And he was in Utopia, 
too ! He was a great red-faced man, with fiery hair, a 
noisy, intolerant maker of enemies, with a tender heart 
and he was one of the samurai ? " 



274 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" He defied the Rules." 

' ' He was a great man with wine. He wrote like wine ; 
in our world he wrote wine ; red wine with the light 
shining through." 

" He was on the Committee that revised our Canon. 
For the revising and bracing of our Canon is work for 
poietic as well as kinetic men. You knew him in your 
world ? " 

" I wish I had. But I have seen him. On earth he 
wrote a thing ... it would run 

" Out of the night that covers me, 

Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever Gods may be, 
For my unconquerable soul. . . ." 

" We have that here. All good earthly things are 
in Utopia also. We put that in the Canon almost as 
soon as he died," said my double. 



5 

" We have now a double Canon, a very fine First 
Canon, and a Second Canon of work by living men and 
work of inferior quality, and a satisfactory knowledge 
of both of these is the fourth intellectual qualification for 
the samurai." 

" It must keep a sort of uniformity in your tone of 
thought." 

" The Canon pervades our whole world. As a matter 



THE SAMURAI. 275 

of fact, very much of it is read and learnt in the schools. 
. . . Next to the intellectual qualification comes the 
physical, the man must be in sound health, free from 
certain foul, avoidable, and demoralising diseases, and 
in good training. We reject men who are fat, or thin 
and flabby, or whose nerves are shaky we refer them 
back to training. And finally the man or woman must 
be fully adult." 

" Twenty-one ? But you said twenty-five ! " 

" The age has varied. At first it was twenty-five 
or over ; then the minimum became twenty-five for 
men and twenty-one for women. Now there is a feel- 
ing that it ought to be raised. We don't want to take 
advantage of mere boy and girl emotions men of my 
way of thinking, at any rate, don't we want to get 
our samurai with experiences, with a settled mature 
conviction. Our hygiene and regimen are rapidly push- 
ing back old age and death, and keeping men hale and 
hearty to eighty and more. There's no need to hurry 
the young. Let them have a chance of wine, love, and 
song ; let them feel the bite of full-bodied desire, and 
know what devils they have to reckon with." 

" But there is a certain fine sort of youth that knows 
the desirability of the better things at nineteen." 

" They may keep the Rule at any time without its 
privileges. But a man who breaks the Rule after his 
adult adhesion at five-and-twenty is no more in the 
samurai for ever. Before that age he is free to break 
it and repent." 

" And now, what is forbidden ? " 



276 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" We forbid a good deal. Many small pleasures do 
no great harm, but we think it well to forbid them, 
none the less, so that we can weed out the self-indul- 
gent. We think that a constant resistance to little 
seductions is good for a man's quality. At any rate, 
it shows that a man is prepared to pay something for 
his honour and privileges. We prescribe a regimen of 
food, forbid tobacco, wine, or any alcoholic drink, all 
narcotic drugs " 

" Meat ? " 

" In all the round world of Utopia there is no meat. 
There used to be. But now we cannot stand the 
thought of slaughter-houses. And, in a population 
that is all educated, and at about the same level of 
physical refinement, it is practically impossible to find 
anyone who will hew a dead ox or pig. We never 
settled the hygienic question of meat-eating at all. 
This other aspect decided us. I can still remember, 
as a boy, the rejoicings over the closing of the last 
slaughter-house. ' ' 

" You eat fish." 

" It isn't a matter of logic. In our barbaric past 
horrible flayed carcases of brutes dripping blood, were 
hung for sale in the public streets." He shrugged his 
shoulders. 

" They do that still in London in my world," I said. 

He looked again at my laxer, coarser face, and did 
not say whatever thought had passed across his mind. 

" Originally the samurai were forbidden usury, that 
is to say the lending of money at fixed rates of interest. 



THE SAMURAI. 277 

They are still under that interdiction, but since our 
commercial code practically prevents usury altogether, 
and our law will not recognise contracts for interest 
upon private accommodation loans to unprosperous 
borrowers, it is now scarcely necessary. The idea of a 
man growing richer by mere inaction and at the expense 
of an impoverishing debtor, is profoundly distasteful to 
Utopian ideas, and our State insists pretty effectually 
now upon the participation of the lender in the bor- 
rower's risks. This, however, is only one part of a 
series of limitations of the same character. It is felt 
that to buy simply in order to sell again brings out 
many unsocial human qualities ; it makes a man seek 
to enhance profits and falsify values, and so the samurai 
are forbidden to buy to sell on their own account or 
for any employer save the State, unless some process 
of manufacture changes the nature of the commodity 
(a mere change in bulk or packing does not suffice), and 
they are forbidden salesmanship and all its arts. Con- 
sequently they cannot be hotel-keepers, or hotel pro- 
prietors, or hotel shareholders, and a doctor all prac- 
tising doctors must be samurai cannot sell drugs ex- 
cept as a public servant of the municipality or the State." 

" That, of course, runs counter to all our current 
terrestrial ideas," I said. " We are obsessed by the 
power of money. These rules will work out as a vow 
of moderate poverty, and if your samurai are an order 
of poor men " 

" They need not be. Samurai who have invented, 
organised, and developed new industries, have become 



278 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

rich men, and many men who have grown rich by bril- 
liant and original trading have subsequently become 
samurai." 

" But these are exceptional cases. The bulk of your 
money-making business must be confined to men who 
are not samurai. You must have a class of rich, power- 
ful outsiders " 

" Have we ? " 

" I don't see the evidences of them." 

" As a matter of fact, we have such people ! There 
are rich traders, men who have made discoveries in 
the economy of distribution, or who have called atten- 
tion by intelligent, truthful advertisement to the possi- 
bilities of neglected commodities, for example." 

" But aren't they a power ? " 

" Why should they be ? " 

" Wealth is power." 

I had to explain that phrase. 

He protested. " Wealth," he said, "is no sort of 
power at all unless you make it one. If it is so in your 
world it is so by inadvertency. Wealth is a State-made 
thing, a convention, the most artificial of powers. You 
can, by subtle statesmanship, contrive what it shall buy 
and what it shall not. In your world it would seem 
you have made leisure, movement, any sort of freedom, 
life itself, purchaseable. The more fools you ! A poor 
working man with you is a man in discomfort and fear. 
No wonder your rich have power. But here a reasonable 
leisure, a decent life, is to be had by every man on easier 
terms than by selling himself to the rich. And rich as 



THE SAMURAI. 279 

men are here, there is no private fortune in the whole 
world that is more than a little thing beside the wealth 
of the State. The samurai control the State and the 
wealth of the State, and by their vows they may not 
avail themselves of any of the coarser pleasures wealth 
can still buy. Where, then, is the power of your wealthy 
man ? " 

" But, then where is the incentive ? " 

" Oh ! a man gets things for himself with wealth 
no end of things. But little or no power over his fellows 
unless they are exceptionally weak or self-indulgent 
persons." 

I reflected. " What else may not the samurai do ? " 
" Acting, singing, or reciting are forbidden them, 
though they may lecture authoritatively or debate. 
But professional mimicry is not only held to be un- 
dignified in a man or woman, but to weaken and cor- 
rupt the soul ; the mind becomes foolishly dependent 
on applause, over-skilful in producing tawdry and 
momentary illusions of excellence ; it is our experience 
that actors and actresses as a class are loud, ignoble, 
and insincere. If they have not such flamboyant quali- 
ties then they are tepid and ineffectual players. Nor 
may the samurai do personal services, except in the 
matter of medicine or surgery ; they may not be barbers, 
for example, nor inn waiters, nor boot cleaners. But, 
nowadays, we have scarcely any barbers or boot cleaners ; 
men do these things for themselves. Nor may a man 
under the Rule be any man's servant, pledged to do 
whatever he is told. He may neither be a servant nor 



280 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

keep one ; he must shave and dress and serve him- 
self, carry his own food from the helper's place to the 
table, redd his sleeping room, and leave it clean. ..." 

" That is all easy enough in a world as ordered as 
yours. I suppose no samurai may bet ? " 

" Absolutely not. He may insure his life and his 
old age for the better equipment of his children, or 
for certain other specified ends, but that is all his deal- 
ings with chance. And he is also forbidden to play 
games in public or to watch them being played. Cer- 
tain dangerous and hardy sports and exercises are pre- 
scribed for him, but not competitive sports between 
man and man or side and side. That lesson was learnt 
long ago before the coming of the samurai. Gentle- 
men of honour, according to the old standards, rode 
horses, raced chariots, fought, and played competitive 
games of skill, and the dull, cowardly and base came 
in thousands to admire, and howl, and bet. The gentle- 
men of honour degenerated fast enough into a sort cf 
athletic prostitute, with all the defects, all the vanity, 
trickery, and self-assertion of the common actor, and 
with even less intelligence. Our Founders made no 
peace with this organisation of public sports. They did 
not spend their lives to secure for all men and women 
on the earth freedom, health, and leisure, in order that 
the}' might waste lives in such folly." 

" We have those abuses," I said, " but some of our 
earthly games have a fine side. There is a game called 
cricket. It is a fine, generous game." 

" Our boys play that, and men too. But it is thought 



THE SAMURAI. 281 

rather puerile to give very much time to it ; men should 
have graver interests. It was undignified and unpleas- 
ant for the samurai to play conspicuously ill, and im- 
possible for them to play so constantly as to keep hand 
and eye in training against the man who was fool enough 
and cheap enough to become an expert. Cricket, tennis, 

fives, billiards . You will find clubs and a class of 

men to play all these things in Utopia, but not the 
samurai. And they must play their games as games, 
not as displays ; the price of a privacy for playing 
cricket, so that they could charge for admission, v/ould 
be overwhelmingly high. . . . Negroes are often very 
clever at cricket. For a time, most of the samurai had 
their sword-play, but few do those exercises now, and 
until about fifty years ago they went out for military 
training, a fortnight in every year, marching long dis- 
tances, sleeping in the open, carrying provisions, and 
sham fighting over unfamiliar ground dotted with dis- 
appearing targets. There was a curious inability in our 
world to realise that war was really over for good and 
all." 

" And now," I said, " haven't we got very nearly 
to the end of your prohibitions ? You have forbidden 
alcohol, drugs, smoking, betting, and usury, games, 
trade, servants. But isn't there a vow of Chastity ? " 

" That is the Rule for your earthly orders ? " 

" Yes except, if I remember rightly, for Platos* 
Guardians." 

" There is a Rule of Chastity here but not of Celi- 
bacy. We know quite clearly that civilisation is an 



282 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

artificial arrangement, and that all the physical and 
emotional instincts of man are too strong, and his nat- 
ural instinct of restraint too weak, for him to live easily 
in the civilised State. Civilisation has developed far 
more rapidly than man has modified. Under the un- 
natural perfection of security, liberty and abundance 
our civilisation has attained, the normal untrained 
human being is disposed to excess in almost every 
direction ; he tends to eat too much and too elaborately, 
to drink too much, to become lazy faster than his work 
can be reduced, to waste his interest upon displays, and 
to make love too much and too elaborately. He gets 
out of training, and concentrates upon egoistic or erotic 
breedings. The past history of our race is very largely 
a history of social collapses due to demoralisation by 
indulgences following security and abundance. In the 
time of our Founders the signs of a world-wide epoch 
of prosperity and relaxation were plentiful. Both sexes 
drifted towards sexual excesses, the men towards senti- 
mental extravagances, imbecile devotions, and the com- 
plication and refinement of physical indulgences ; the 
women towards those expansions and differentiations of 
feeling that find expression in music and costly and 
distinguished dress. Both sexes became unstable and 
promiscuous. The whole world seemed disposed to 
do exactly the same thing with its sexual interest as 
it had done with its appetite for food and drink make 
the most of it." 

He paused. 

" Satiety came to help you," I said. 



THE SAMURAI. 283 

" Destruction may come before satiety. Our Founders 
organised motives from all sorts of sources, but I think 
the chief force to give men self-control is Pride. Pride 
may not be the noblest thing in the soul, but it is the 
best King there, for all that. They looked to it to keep 
a man clean and sound and sane. In this matter, as 
in all matters of natural desire, they held no appetite 
must be glutted, no appetite must have artificial whets, 
and also and equally that no appetite should be starved. 
A man must come from the table satisfied, but not 
replete. And, in the matter of love, a straight and 
clean desire for a clean and straight fellow-creature was 
our Founders' ideal. They enjoined marriage between 
equals as the samurai's duty to the race, and they 
framed directions of the precisest sort to prevent that 
uxorious inseparableness, that connubiality which will 
reduce a couple of people to something jointly less than 
either. That Canon is too long to tell you now. A 
man under the Rule who loves a woman who does not 
follow it, must either leave the samurai to marry her, 
or induce her to accept what is called the Woman's 
Rule, which, while it excepts her from the severer quali- 
fications and disciplines, brings her regimen of life into 
a working harmony with his." 

" Suppose she breaks the Rule afterwards ? " 
" He must leave either her or the order." 
" There is matter for a novel or so in that." 
" There has been matter for hundreds." 
" Is the Woman's Rule a sumptuary law as well as 
a regimen ? I mean may she dress as she pleases ? : ' 



284 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

" Not a bit of it," said my double. " Every woman 
who could command money used it, we found, to make 
underbred aggressions on other women. As men emerged 
to civilisation, women seemed going back to savagery 
to paint and feathers. But the samurai, both men and 
women, and the women under the Lesser Rule also, all 
have a particular dress. No difference is made between 
women under either the Great or the Lesser Rule. You 
have seen the men's dress always like this I wear. 
The women may wear the same, either with the hair 
cut short or plaited behind them, or they may have a 
high-waisted dress of very fine, soft woollen material, 
with their hair coiled up behind." 

" I have seen it," I said. Indeed, nearly all the 
women had seemed to be wearing variants of that 
simple formula. " It seems to me a very beautiful 
dress. The other I'm not used to. But I like it on 
girls and slender women." 

I had a thought, and added, " Don't they some- 
times, well take a good deal of care, dressing their 
hair ? " 

My double laughed in my eyes. " They do," he said. 

" And the Rule ? " 

" The Rule is never fussy," said my double, still 
smiling. 

" We don't want women to cease to be beautiful, 
and consciously beautiful, if you like," he added. " The 
more real beauty of form and face we have, the finer 
our world. But costly sexual ised trappings 

" I should have thought," I said, " a class of women 



THE SAMURAI. 285 

who traded on their sex would have arisen, women, I 
mean, who found an interest and an advantage in em- 
phasising their individual womanly beauty. There is 
no law to prevent it. Surely they would tend to 
counteract the severity of costume the Rule dictates." 

" There are such women. But for all that the Rule 
sets the key of everyday dress. If a woman is possessed 
by the passion for gorgeous raiment she usually satisfies 
it in her own private circle, or with rare occasional on- 
slaughts upon the public eye. Her everyday mood and 
the disposition of most people is against being con- 
spicuous abroad. And I should say there are little 
liberties under the Lesser Rule ; a discreet use of fine 
needlework and embroidery, a wider choice of materials." 

" You have no changing fashions ? " 

" None. For all that, are not our dresses as beautiful 
as yours ? " 

" Our women's dresses are not beautiful at all," I 
said, forced for a time towards the mysterious philos- 
ophy of dress. " Beauty ? That isn't their concern." 

" Then what are they after ? " 

" Mv dear man ! What is all my world after ? " 



6 

I should come to our third talk with a great curiosity 
to hear of the last portion of the Rule, of the things 
that the samurai are obliged to do. 



286 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

There would be many precise directions regarding his 
health, and rules that would aim at once at health and 
that constant exercise of will that makes life good. 
Save in specified exceptional circumstances, the samurai 
must bathe in cold water, and the men must shave every 
day ; they have the precisest directions in such matters ; 
the body must be in health, the skin and muscles and 
nerves in perfect tone, or the samurai must go to the 
doctors of the order, and give implicit obedience to 
the regimen prescribed. They must sleep alone at 
least four nights in five ; and they must eat with and 
talk to anyone in their fellowship who cares for their 
conversation for an hour, at least, at the nearest club- 
house of the samurai once on three chosen days in 
every week. Moreover, they must read aloud from the 
Book of the Samurai for at least ten minutes every day. 
Every month they must buy and read faithfully through 
at least one book that has been published during the 
past five years, and the only intervention with private 
choice in that matter is the prescription of a certain 
minimum of length for the monthly book or books. 
But the full Rule in these minor compulsory matters 
is voluminous and detailed, and it abounds with alter- 
natives. Its aim is rather to keep before the samurai 
by a number of sample duties, as it were, the need of, 
and some of the chief methods towards health of body 
and mind, rather than to provide a comprehensive rule, 
and to ensure the maintenance of a community of feel- 
ing and interests among the samurai through habit, 
intercourse, and a living contemporary literature. These 



THE SAMURAI. 287 

minor obligations do not earmark more than an hour 
in the day. Yet they serve to break down isolations 
of sympathy, all sorts of physical and intellectual 
sluggishness and the development of unsocial preoccu- 
pations of many sorts. 

Women samurai who are married, my double told 
me. must bear children if they are to remain married 
as well as in the order before the second period for 
terminating a childless marriage is exhausted. I failed 
to ask for the precise figures from my double at the time, 
but I think it is beyond doubt that it is from samurai 
mothers of the Greater or Lesser Rule that a very large 
proportion of the future population of Utopia will be 
derived. There is one liberty accorded to women 
samurai which is refused to men, and that is to marry 
outside the Rule, and women married to men not under 
the Rule are also free to become samurai. Here, too, 
it will be manifest there is scope for novels and the 
drama of life. In practice, it seems that it is only 
men of great poietic distinction outside the Rule, or 
great commercial leaders, who have wives under it. 
The tendency of such unions Is either to bring the 
husband under the Rule, or take the wife out of it. 
There can be no doubt that these marriage limitations 
tend to make the samurai something of an hereditary 
class. Their children, as a rule, become samurai. 
But it is not an exclusive caste ; subject to the most 
reasonable qualifications, anyone who sees fit can enter 
it at any time, and so, unlike all other privileged castes 
the world has seen, it increases relatively to the total 



288 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

population, and may indeed at last assimilate almost 
the whole population of the earth. 



7 

So much my double told me readily. 

But now he came to the heart of all his explana- 
tions, to the will and motives at the centre that made 
men and women ready to undergo discipline, to renounce 
the richness and elaboration of the sensuous life, to 
master emotions and control impulses, to keep in the 
key of effort while they had abundance about them to 
rouse and satisfy^all desires, and his exposition was more 
difficult. 

He tried to make his religion clear to me. 

The leading principle of the Utopian religion is the 
repudiation of the doctrine of original sin ; the Utopians 
hold that man, on the whole, is good. That is their 
cardinal belief. Man has pride and conscience, they 
hold, that you may refine by training as you refine 
his eye and ear ; he has remorse and sorrow in his 
being, coming on the heels of all inconsequent enjoy- 
ments. How can one think of him as bad ? He is 
religious ; religion is as natural to him as lust and 
anger, less intense, indeed, but coming with a wide- 
sweeping inevitableness as peace comes after all tumults 
and noises. And in Utopia they understand this, or, 
at least, the samurai do, clearly. They accept Religion 



THE SAMURAI. 289 

as they accept Thirst, as something inseparably in the 
mysterious rhythms of life. And just as thirst and 
pride and all desires may be perverted in an age of 
abundant opportunities, and men may be degraded and 
wasted by intemperance in drinking, by display, or by 
ambition, so too the nobler complex of desires that con- 
stitutes religion may be turned to evil by the dull, the 
base, and the careless. Slovenly indulgence in religious 
inclinations, a failure to think hard and discriminate 
as fairly as possible in religious matters, is just as alien 
to the men under the Rule as it would be to drink 
deeply because they were thirsty, eat until glutted, 
evade a bath because the day was chilly, or make love 
to any bright-eyed girl who chanced to look pretty in 
the dusk. Utopia, which is to have every type of 
character that one finds on earth, will have its temples 
and its priests, just as it will have its actresses and 
wine, but the samurai will be forbidden the religion of 
dramatically lit altars, organ music, and incense, as 
distinctly as they are forbidden the love of painted 
women, or the consolations of brandy. And to all the 
things that are less than religion and that seek to com- 
prehend it, to cosmogonies and philosophies, to creeds 
and formula;, to catechisms and easy explanations, the 
attitude of the samurai, the note of the Book of Samurai, 
will be distrust. These things, the samurai will say, are 
part of the indulgences that should come before a man sub- 
mits himself to the Rule ; they are like the early gratifica- 
tions of young men, experiences to establish renunciation. 

The samurai will have emerged above these things. 

10 



290 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

The theology of the Utopian rulers will be satu- 
rated with that same philosophy of uniqueness, that 
repudiation of anything beyond similarities and prac- 
tical parallelisms, that saturates all their institutions. 
They will have analysed exhaustively those fallacies and 
assumptions that arise between the One and the Many, 
that have troubled philosophy since philosophy began. 
Just as they will have escaped that delusive unification 
of every species under its specific definition that has 
dominated earthly reasoning, so they will have escaped 
the delusive simplification of God that vitiates all ter- 
restrial theology. They will hold God to be complex 
and of an endless variety of aspects, to be expressed by no 
universal formula nor approved in any uniform manner. 
Just as the language of Utopia will be a synthesis, 
even so will its God be. The aspect of God is different 
in the measure of every man's individuality, and the 
intimate thing of religion must, therefore, exist in 
human solitude, between man and God alone. Religion 
in its quintessence is a relation between God and man ; 
it is perversion to make it a relation between man and 
man, and a man may no more reach God through a 
priest than love his wife through a priest. But just as 
a man in love may refine the interpretation of his feeJ- 
ings and borrow expression from the poems and musi 
of poietic men, so an individual man may at his dis 
cretion read books of devotion and hear music that i? 
in harmony with his inchoate feelings. Many of the 
samurai, therefore, will set themselves private regimens 
that will help their secret religious life, will pray habitu- 



THE SAMURAI. 291 

ally, and read books of devotion, but with these things 
the Rule of the order will have nothing to do. 

Clearly the God of the samurai is a transcendental 
and mystical God. So far as the samurai have a 
purpose in common in maintaining the State, and the 
order and progress of the world, so far, by their dis- 
cipline and denial, by their public work and effort, they 
worship God together. But the fount of motives lies 
in the individual life, it lies in silent and deliberate 
reflections, and at this, the most striking of all the 
rules of the samurai aims. For seven consecutive days 
in the year, at least, each man or woman under the 
Rule must go right out of all the life of man into some 
wild and solitary place, must speak to no man or woman, 
and have no sort of intercourse with mankind. They 
must go bookless and weaponless, without pen or paper, 
or money. Provisions must be taken for the period 
of the journey, a rug or sleeping sack for they must 
sleep under the open sky but no means of making a 
fire. They may study maps beforehand to guide them, 
showing any difficulties and dangers in the journey, 
but they may not carry such helps. They must not 
go by beaten ways or wherever there are inhabited 

-- houses, but into the bare, quiet places of the globe 
^ the regions set apart for them. 

This discipline, my double said, was invented to 
secure a certain stoutness of heart and body in the 

- members of the order, which otherwise might have 
lain open to too many timorous, merely abstemious, 
men and women. Many things had been suggested, 



292 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

swordplay and tests that verged on torture, climbing 
in giddy places and the like, before this was chosen. 
Partly, it is to ensure good training and sturdiness of 
body and mind, but partly, also, it is to draw their 
minds for a space from the insistent details of life, 
from the intricate arguments and the fretting effort to 
work, from personal quarrels and personal affections, 
and the things of the heated room. Out they must 
go, clean out of the world. 

Certain great areas are set apart for these yearly 
pilgrimages beyond the securities of the State. There 
are thousands of square miles of sandy desert in Africa 
and Asia set apart ; much of the Arctic and Antarctic 
circles ; vast areas of mountain land and frozen marsh ; 
secluded reserves of forest, and innumerable unfre- 
quented lines upon the sea. Some are dangerous and 
laborious routes ; some merely desolate ; and there are 
even some sea journeys that one may take in the halcyon 
days as one drifts through a dream. Upon the seas 
one must go in a little undecked sailing boat, that 
may be rowed in a calm ; all the other journeys one 
must do afoot, none aiding. There are, about all these 
desert regions and along most coasts, little offices at 
which the samurai says good-bye to the world of men, 
and at which they arrive after their minimum time 
of silence is overpast. For the intervening days they 
must be alone with Nature, necessity, and their own 
thoughts. 

"It is good?" I' said. 

"It is good," my double answered. " We civilised 



THE SAMURAI. 293 

men go back to the stark Mother that so many of us 
would have forgotten were it not for this Rule. And 
one thinks. . . . Only two weeks ago I did my journey 
for the year. I went with my gear by sea to Tromso, 
and then inland to a starting-place, and took my ice- 
axe and rucksack, and said good-bye to the world. I 
crossed over four glaciers ; I climbed three high moun- 
tain passes, and slept on moss in desolate valleys. 
I saw no human being for seven days. Then I came 
down through pine woods to the head of a road that 
runs to the Baltic shore. Altogether it was thirteen 
days before I reported myself again, and had speech 
with fellow creatures." 

" And the women do this ? " 

" The women who are truly samurai yes. Equally 
with the men. Unless the coming of children inter- 
venes." 

I asked him how it had seemed to him, and what 
he thought about during the journey. 

" There is always a sense of effort for me," he said, 
" when I leave the world at the outset of the journey. 
I turn back again and again, and look at the little 
office as I go up my mountain side. The first day 
and night I'm a little disposed to shirk the job every 
year it's the same a little disposed, for example, to 
sling my pack from my back, 'and sit down, and go 
through its contents, and make sure I've got all my 
equipment." 

" There's no chance of anyone overtaking you ? " 

" Two men mustn't start from the same office on 



294 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

the same route within six hours of each other. If they 
come within sight of each other, they must shun an 
encounter, and make no sign unless life is in danger. 
All that is arranged beforehand." 

" It would be, of course. Go on telling me of your 
journey." 

" I dread the night. I dread discomfort and bad 
weather. I only begin to brace up after the second 
day." 

" Don't you worry about losing your way ? " 

" No. There are cairns and skyline signs. If it 
wasn't for that, of course ^ye should be worrying with 
maps the whole time. But I'm only sure of being a 
man after the second night, and sure of my power to 
go through." 

" And then ? " 

" Then one begins to get into it. The first two 
days one is apt to have the events of one's journey, 
little incidents of travel, and thoughts of one's work 
and affairs, rising and fading and coming again ; but 
then the perspectives begin. I don't sleep much at 
nights on these journeys ; I lie awake and stare at 
the stars. About dawn, perhaps, and in the morning 
sunshine, I sleep ! The nights this last time were very 
short, never more than twilight, and I saw the glow 
of the sun always, just over the edge of the world. 
But I had chosen the days of the new moon, so that 
I could have a glimpse of the stars. . . . Years ago, I 
went from the Nile across the Libyan Desert east, 
and then the stars the stars in the later days of that 



THE SAMURAI. 295 

journey brought me near weeping. . . . You begin to 
feel alone on the third day, when you find yourself 
out on some shining snowfield, and nothing of man- 
kind visible in the whole world save one landmark, 
one remote thin red triangle of iron, perhaps, in the 
saddle of the ridge against the sky. All this busy 
world that has done so much and so marvellously, and 
is still so little yon see it little as it is and far off. 
All day long you go and the night comes, and it might 
be another planet. Then, in the quiet, waking hours, 
one thinks of one's self and the great external things, 
of space and eternity, and what one means by God." 

He mused. 

" You think of death ? " 

"Not of my own. But when I go among snows 
and desolations and usually I take my pilgrimage in 
mountains or the north I think very much of the 
Night of this World the time when our sun will be 
red and dull, and air and water will lie frozen together 
in a common snowfield where now the forests of the 
tropics are steaming. ... I think very much of that, 
and whether it is indeed God's purpose that our kind 
should end, and the cities we have built, the books we 
have written, all that we have given substance and a 
form, should lie dead beneath the snows." 

" You don't believe that ? " 

" No. But if it is not so . I went threading 

my way among gorges and precipices, with my poor 
brain dreaming of what the alternative should be, with 
my imagination straining and failing. Yet, in those 



296 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

high airs and in such solitude, a kind of exaltation 
comes to men. ... I remember that one night I sat 
up and told the rascal stars very earnestly how they 
should not escape us in the end"." 

He glanced at me for a moment as though he doubted 
I should understand. 

" One becomes a personification up there," he said. 
" One becomes the ambassador of mankind to the outer 
world. 

" There is time to think over a lot of things. One 
puts one's self and one's ambition in a new pair of 
scales. . . . 

" Then there are hours when one is just exploring 
the wilderness like a child. Sometimes perhaps one 
gets a glimpse from some precipice edge of the plains 
far away, and houses and roadways, and remembers 
there is still a busy world of men. And at last one 
turns one's feet down some slope, some gorge that leads 
back. You come down, perhaps, into a pine forest, 
and hear that queer clatter reindeer make and then, 
it may be, see a herdsman very far away, watching you. 
You wear your pilgrim's badge, and he makes no sign 
of seeing you. . . . 

" You know, after these solitudes, I feel just the 
same queer disinclination to go back to the world of 
men that I feel when I have to leave it. I think of 
dusty roads and hot valleys, and being looked at by 
many people. I think of the trouble of working with 
colleagues and opponents. This last journey I out- 
stayed my time, camping in the pine woods for six 



THE SAMURAI. 297 

days. Then my thoughts came round to my proper 
work again. I got keen to go on with it, and so I 
came back into the world. You come back physically 
clean as though you had had your arteries and veins 
washed out. And your brain has been cleaned, too. 
... I shall stick to the mountains now until I am 
old, and then I shall sail a boat in Polynesia. That 
is what so many old men do. Only last year one of 
the great leaders of the samurai a white-haired man, 
who followed the Rule in spite of his one hundred and 
eleven years was found dead in his boat far away 
from any land, far to the south, lying like a child 
asleep. . . ." 

" That's better than a tumbled bed," said I, " and 
some boy of a doctor jabbing you with injections, and 
distressful people hovering about you." 

" Yes," said my double ; " in Utopia we who are 
samurai die better than that. ... Is that how your 
great men die ? " 

It came to me suddenly as very strange that, even 
as we sat and talked, across deserted seas, on burning 
sands, through the still aisles of forests, and in all the 
high and lonely places of the world, beyond the margin 
where the ways and houses go, solitary men and women 
sailed alone or marched alone, or clambered quiet, 
resolute exiles ; they stood alone amidst wildernesses 
of ice, on the precipitous banks of roaring torrents, in 
monstrous caverns, or steering a tossing boat in the 
little circle of the horizon amidst the tumbled, incessant 
sea, all in their several ways communing with the 

10 a 



298 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

emptiness, the enigmatic spaces and silences, the winds 
and torrents and soulless forces that lie about the lit 
and ordered life of men. 

I saw more clearly now something I had seen dimly 
already, in the bearing and the faces of this Utopian 
chivalry, a faint persistent tinge of detachment from 
the immediate heats and hurries, the little graces and 
delights, the tensions and stimulations of the daily 
world. It pleased me strangely to think of this stead- 
fast yearly pilgrimage of solitude, and how near men 
might come then to the high distances of God. 



8 

After that I remember we fell talking of the disci- 
pline of the Rule, of the Courts that try breaches of 
it, and interpret doubtful cases for, though a man 
may resign with due notice and be free after a certain 
time to rejoin again, one deliberate breach may exclude 
a man for ever of the system of law that has grown 
up about such trials, and of the triennial council that 
revises and alters the Rule. From that we passed to 
the discussion of the general constitution of this World 
State. Practically all political power vests in the 
samurai. Not only are they the only administrators, 
lawyers, practising doctors, and public officials of almost 
all kinds, but they are the only voters. Yet, by a 
curious exception, the supreme legislative assembly 



THE SAMURAI. 299 

must have one-tenth, and may have one-half of its 
members outside the order, because, it is alleged, there 
is a sort of wisdom that comes of sin and laxness, which 
is necessary to the perfect ruling of life. My double 
quoted me a verse from the Canon on this matter that 
my unfortunate verbal memory did not retain, but it 
was in the nature of a prayer to save the world from 
" unfermented men." It would seem that Aristotle's 
idea of a rotation of rulers, an idea that crops up again 
in Harrington's Oceana, that first Utopia of " the sov- 
ereign people " (a Utopia that, through Danton's read- 
ings in English, played a disastrous part in the French 
Revolution), gets little respect in Utopia. The tend- 
ency is to give a practically permanent tenure to good 
men. Every ruler and official, it is true, is put on his 
trial every three years before a jury drawn by lot, ac- 
cording to the range of his activities, either from the 
samurai of his municipal area or from the general cata- 
logue of the samurai, but the business of this jury is 
merely to decide whether to continue him in office or 
order a new election. In the majority of cases the 
verdict is continuation. Even if it is not so the official 
may still appear as a candidate before the second and 
separate jury which fills the vacant post. . . . 

My double mentioned a few scattered details of the 
electoral methods, but as at that time I believed we 
were to have a number of further conversations, I did 
not exhaust my curiosities upon this subject. Indeed, I 
was more than a little preoccupied and inattentive. The 
religion of the samurai was after my heart, and it had 



300 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

taken hold of me very strongly. . . . But presently I 
fell questioning him upon the complications that arise 
in the Modern Utopia through the differences between 
the races of men, and found my attention returning. 
But the matter of that discussion I shall put apart 
into a separate chapter. In the end we came back to 
the particulars of this great Rule of Life that any man 
desiring of joining the samurai must follow. 

I remember how, after our third bout of talking, I 
walked back through the streets of Utopian London to 
rejoin the botanist at our hotel. 

My double lived in an apartment in a great build- 
ing I should judge about where, in our London, the 
Tate Gallery squats, and, as the day was fine, and I 
had no reason for hurry, I went not by the covered 
mechanical way, but on foot along the broad, tree-set 
terraces that follow the river on either side. 

It was afternoon, and the mellow Thames Valley 
sunlight, warm and gentle, lit a clean and gracious 
world. There were many people abroad, going to and 
fro, unhurrying, but not aimless, and I watched them 
so attentively that were you to ask me for the most 
elementary details of the buildings and terraces that 
lay back on either bank, or of the pinnacles and towers 
and parapets that laced the sky, I could not tell you 
them. But of the people I could tell a great deal. 

No Utopians wear black, and for all the frequency 
of the samurai uniform along the London ways the 
general effect is of a gaily-coloured population. You 
never see anyone noticeably ragged or dirty ; the police, 



THE SAMURAI. 301 

who answer questions and keep order (and are quite 
distinct from the organisation for the pursuit of crim- 
inals) see to that ; and shabby people are very infre- 
quent. People who want to save money for other pur- 
poses, or who do not want much bother with their 
clothing, seem to wear costumes of rough woven cloth, 
dyed an unobtrusive brown or green, over fine woollen 
underclothing, and so achieve a decent comfort in its 
simplest form. Others outside the Rule of the samurai 
range the spectrum for colour, and have every variety 
of texture ; the colours attained by the Utopian dyers 
seem to me to be fuller and purer than the common 
range of stuffs on earth ; and the subtle folding of the 
woollen materials witness that Utopian Bradford is no 
whit behind her earthly sister. White is extraordin- 
arily frequent ; white woollen tunics and robes into 
which are woven bands of brilliant colour, abound. 
Often these ape the cut and purple edge that distin- 
guishes the samurai. In Utopian London the air is as 
clear and less dusty than it is among high mountains ; 
the roads are made of unbroken surfaces, and not of 
friable earth ; all heating is done by electricity, and no 
coal ever enters the town ; there are no horses or dogs, 
and so there is not a suspicion of smoke and scarcely 
a particle of any sort of dirt to render white impossible. 

The radiated influence of the uniform of the samurai 
has been to keep costume simple, and this, perhaps, 
emphasises the general effect of vigorous health, of 
shapely bodies. Everyone is well grown and well nour- 
ished ; everyone seems in good condition ; everyone 



302 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

walks well, and has that clearness of eye that comes 
with cleanness of blood. In London I am apt to con- 
sider myself of a passable size and carriage ; here I feel 
small and mean-looking. The faint suspicions of spinal 
curvatures, skew feet, unequal legs, and ill-grown bones, 
that haunt one in a London crowd, the plain intima- 
tions in yellow faces, puffy faces, spotted and irregu- 
lar complexions, in nervous movements and coughs and 
colds of bad habits and an incompetent or disregarded 
medical profession, do not appear here. I notice few old 
people, but there seems to be a greater proportion of 
men and women at or near the prime of life. 

I hang upon that. I have seen one or two fat people 
here they are all the more noticeable because they are 
rare. But wrinkled age ? Have I yet in Utopia set 
eyes on a bald head ? 

The Utopians have brought a sounder physiological 
science than ours to bear upon regimen. People know 
better what to do and what to avoid, how to foresee 
and forestall coming trouble, and how to evade and 
suppress the subtle poisons that blunt the edge of sen- 
sation. They have put off the years of decay. They 
keep their teeth, they keep their digestions, they ward 
off gout and rheumatism, neuralgia and influenza and 
all those cognate decays that bend and wrinkle men 
and women in the middle years of existence. They 
have extended the level years far into the seventies, 
and age, when it comes, comes swiftly and easily. The 
feverish hurry of our earth, the decay that begins be- 
fore growth has ceased, is replaced by a ripe prolonged 



THE SAMURAI. 303 

maturity. This modern Utopia is an adult world. The 
flushed romance, the predominant eroticisms, the adven- 
turous uncertainty of a world in which youth prevails, 
gives place here to a grave deliberation, to a fuller 
and more powerful emotion, to a broader handling of 
life. 

Yet youth is here. 

Amidst the men whose faces have been made fine 
by thought and steadfast living, among the serene-eyed 
women, comes youth, gaily-coloured, buoyantly healthy, 
with challenging eyes, with fresh and eager face. . . . 

For everyone in Utopia who is sane enough to benefit, 
study and training last until twenty ; then comes the 
travel year, and many are still students until twenty- 
four or twenty-five. Most are still, in a sense, students 
throughout life, but it is thought that, unless responsible 
action is begun in some form in the early twenties, will 
undergoes a partial atrophy. But the full swing of 
adult life is hardly attained until thirty is reached. 
Men marry before the middle thirties, and the women 
rather earlier, few are mothers before five-and-twenty. 
The majority of those who become samurai do so be- 
tween twenty-seven and thirty-five. And, between 
seventeen and thirty, the Utopians have their dealings 
with love, and the play and excitement of love is a 
chief interest in life. Much freedom of act is allowed 
them so that their wills may grow freely. For the most 
part they end mated, and love gives place to some 
special and more enduring interest, though, indeed, 
there is love between older men and fresh girls, and 



304 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

between youths and maturer women. It is in these 
most graceful and beautiful years of life that such free- 
doms of dress as the atmosphere of Utopia permits are 
to be seen, and the crude bright will and imagination 
of youth peeps out in ornament and colour. 

Figures come into my sight and possess me for a 
moment and pass, and give place to others ; there 
comes a dusky little Je\vess, red-lipped and amber- 
clad, with a deep crimson flower I know not whether 
real or sham in the dull black of her hair. She passes 
me with an unconscious disdain ; and then I am look- 
ing at a brightly-smiling, blue-eyed girl, tall, ruddy, 
and freckled warmly, clad like a stage Rosalind, and 
talking gaily to a fair young man, a novice under the 
Rule. A red-haired mother under the Lesser Rule goes 
by, green-gowned, with dark green straps crossing be- 
tween her breasts, and her two shock-headed children, 
bare-legged and lightly shod, tug at her hands on either 
side. Then a grave man in a long, fur-trimmed robe, a 
merchant, maybe, debates some serious matter with a 

white-tunicked clerk. And the clerk's face ? I 

turn to mark the straight, blue-black hair. The man 
must be Chinese. . . 

Then come two short-bearded men in careless indigo 
blue raiment, both of them convulsed with laughter 
men outside the Rule, who practise, perhaps, some art 
and then one of the samurai, in cheerful altercation 
with a blue-robed girl of eight. " But you could have 
come back yesterday, Dadda," she persists. He is 
deeply sunburnt, and suddenly there passes before my 



THE SAMURAI. 305 

mind the picture of a snowy mountain waste at night- 
fall and a solitary small figure under the stars. . . . 

When I come back to the present thing again, my 
eye is caught at once by a young negro, carrying books 
in his hand, a prosperous-looking, self-respecting young 
negro, in a trimly-cut coat of purple-blue and silver. 

I am reminded of what my double said to me of race. 



CHAPTER THE TENTH 

RACE IN UTOPIA 



ABOVE the sphere of the elemental cravings and 
./JL necessities, the soul of man is in a perpetual 
vacillation between two conflicting impulses : the desire 
to assert his individual differences, the desire for dis- 
tinction, and his terror of isolation. He wants to stand 
out, but not too far out, and, on the contrary, he wants 
to merge himself with a group, with some larger body, 
but not altogether. Through all the things of life runs 
this tortuous compromise, men follow the fashions but 
resent ready-made uniforms on every plane of their 
being. The disposition to form aggregations and to< 
imagine aggregations is part of the incurable nature 
of man ; it is one of the great natural forces the states- 
man must utilise, and against which he must construct 
effectual defences. The study of the aggregations and 
of the ideals of aggregations about which men's sym- 
pathies will twine, and upon which they will base a 
large proportion of their conduct and personal policy, 
is the legitimate definition of sociology. 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 307 

Now the sort of aggregation to which men and women 
will refer themselves is determined partly by the strength 
and idiosyncrasy of the individual imagination, and 
partly by the reek of ideas that chances to be in the 
air at the time. Men and women may vary greatly 
both in their innate arid their acquired disposition to- 
wards this sort of larger body or that, to which their 
social reference can be made. The " natural " social 
reference of a man is probably to some rather vaguely 
conceived tribe, as the " natural " social reference of a 
dog is to a pack. But just as the social reference of a 
dog may be educated until the reference to a pack is 
completely replaced by a reference to an owner, so on 
his higher plane of educability the social reference of 
the civilised man undergoes the most remarkable trans- 
formations. But the power and scope of his imagina- 
tion and the need he has of response sets limits to this 
process. A highly intellectualised mature mind may 
refer for its data very consistently to ideas of a higher 
being so remote and indefinable as God, so compre- 
hensive as humanity, so far-reaching as the purpose in 
things. I write " may," but I doubt if this exaltation 
of reference is ever permanently sustained. Comte, in 
his Positive Polity, exposes his soul with great freedom, 
and the curious may trace how, while he professes and 
quite honestly intends to refer himself always to his 
" Greater Being " Humanity, he narrows constantly to 
his projected " Western Republic " of civilised men, 
and quite frequently to the minute indefinite body of 
Positivist subscribers. And the history of the Christian 



3 o8 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

Church, with its development of orders and cults, sects 
and dissents, the history of fashionable society with its 
cliques and sets and every political history with its 
cabals and inner cabinets, witness to the struggle that 
goes on in the minds of men to adjust themselves to a 
body larger indeed than themselves, but which still 
does not strain and escape their imaginative grasp. 

The statesman, both for himself and others, must 
recognise this inadequacy of grasp, and the necessity 
for real and imaginary aggregations to sustain men in 
their practical service of the order of the world. He 
must be a sociologist ; he must study the whole science 
of aggregations in relation to that World State to which 
his reason and his maturest thought direct him. He 
must lend himself to the development of aggregatory 
ideas that favour the civilising process, and he must 
do his best to promote the disintegration of aggrega- 
tions and the effacement of aggregatory ideas, that 
keep men narrow and unreasonably prejudiced one 
against another. 

He will, of course, know that few men are even'rudely 
consistent in such matters, that the same man in differ- 
ent moods and on different occasions, is capable of 
referring himself in perfect good faith, not only to differ- 
ent, but to contradictory larger beings, and that the 
more important thing about an aggregatory idea from 
the State maker's point of view is not so much what it 
explicitly involves as what it implicitly repudiates. 
The natural man does not feel he is aggregating at all, 
unless he aggregates against something. He refers him- 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 309 

self to the tribe ; he is loyal to the tribe, and quite 
inseparably he fears or dislikes those others outside the 
tribe. The tribe is always at least defensively hostile 
and usually actively hostile to humanity beyond the 
aggregation. The Anti-idea, it would seem, is insep- 
arable from the aggregatory idea ; it is a necessity of 
the human mind. When we think of the class A as 
desirable, we think of Not-A as undesirable. The two 
things are as inevitably connected as the tendons of our 
hands, so that when we flatten down our' little fingers 
on our palms, the fourth digit, whether we want it or not, 
.comes down halfway. All real working gods, one may 
remark, all gods that are worshipped emotionally, are 
tribal gods, and every attempt to universalise the idea 
of God trails dualism and the devil after it as a moral 
necessity. 

When we inquire, as well as the unformed condition 
of terrestrial sociology permits, into the aggregatory 
ideas that seem to satisfy men, we find a remarkable 
complex, a disorderly complex, in the minds of nearly 
all our civilised contemporaries. For example, all sorts 
of aggregatory ideas come and go across the chameleon 
surfaces of my botanist's mind. He has a strong feeling 
for systematic botanists as against plant physiologists, 
whom he regards as lewd and evil scoundrels in this 
relation, but he has a strong feeling for all botanists, 
and, indeed, all biologists, as against physicists, and 
those who profess the exact sciences, all of whom he 
regards as dull, mechanical, ugly-minded scoundrels in 
this relation ; but he has a strong feeling for all who 



3 io A MODERN UTOPIA. 

profess what is called Science as against psychologists, 
sociologists, philosophers, and literary men, whom he 
regards as wild, foolish, immoral scoundrels in this rela- 
tion ; but he has a strong feeling for all educated men 
as against the working man, whom he regards as a 
cheating, lying, loafing, drunken, thievish, dirty scoun- 
drel in this relation but so soon as the working man 
is comprehended together with those others, as English- 
men which includes, in this case, I may remark, the 
Scottish and Welsh he holds them superior to all other 
sorts of European, whom he regards, &c. . . . 

Now one perceives in all these aggregatory ideas and 
' rearrangements of the sympathies one of the chief vices 
of human thought, due to its obsession by classificatory 
suggestions.* The necessity for marking out classes has 
brought with it a bias for false and excessive contrast, 
and we never invent a term but we are at once cram- 
ming it with implications beyond its legitimate content. 
There is no feat of irrelevance that people will not per- 
form quite easily in this way ; there is no class, how- 
ever accidental, to which they will not at once ascribe 
deeply distinctive qualities. The seventh sons of seventh 
sons have remarkable powers of insight ; people with 
a certain sort of ear commit crimes of violence ; people 
with red hair have souls of fire ; all democratic so- 
cialists are trustworthy persons; all people born in 
Ireland have vivid imaginations and all Englishmen are 
clods j all Hindoos are cowardly liars ; all curly-haired 
people are good-natured ; all hunch-backs are energetic 

* See Chapter the First, 5, and the Appendix. 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 311 

and wicked, and all Frenchmen eat frogs. Such stupid 
generalisations have been believed with the utmost 
readiness, and acted upon by great numbers of sane, 
respectable people. And when the class is one's own 
class, when it expresses one of the aggregations to which 
one refers one's own activities, then the disposition to 
divide all qualities between this class and its converse, 
and to cram one's own class with every desirable dis- 
tinction, becomes overwhelming. 

It is part of the training of the philosopher to regard 
all such generalisations with suspicion ; it is part of 
the training of the Utopist and statesman, and all good 
statesmen are Utopists, to mingle something very like 
animosity with that suspicion. For crude classifications 
and false generalisations are the curse of all organised 
human life. 



2 

Disregarding classes, cliques, sets, castes, and the like 
minor aggregations, concerned for the most part with 
details and minor aspects of life, one finds among the 
civilised peoples of the world certain broad types of 
aggregatory idea. There are, firstly, the national ideas, 
ideas which, in their perfection, require a uniformity of 
physical and mental type, a common idiom, a common 
religion, a distinctive style of costume, decoration, and 
thought, and a compact organisation acting with com- 
plete external unity. Like the Gothic cathedral, the 



3 i2 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

national idea is never found complete with all its parts ; 
but one has in Russia, with her insistence on political 
and religious orthodoxy, something approaching it pretty 
closely, and again in the inland and typical provinces 
of China, where even a strange pattern of hat arbuses 
hostility. We had it in vigorous struggle to exist in 
England under the earlier Georges in the minds of those 
who supported the Established Church. The idea of 
the fundamental nature of nationality is so ingrained 
in thought, with all the usual exaggeration of implica- 
tion, that no one laughs at talk about Swedish painting 
or American literature. And I will confess and point 
out that my own detachment from these delusions is 
so imperfect and discontinuous that in another passage 
I have committed myself to a short assertion of the 
exceptionally noble quality of the English imagination.* 
I am constantly gratified by flattering untruths about 
English superiority which I should reject indignantly 
were the application bluntly personal, and I am ever 
ready to believe the scenery of England, the poetry of 
England, even the decoration and music of England, in 
some mystic and impregnable way, the best. This habit 
of intensifying all class definitions, and particularly those 
in which one has a personal interest, is in the very con- 
stitution o'f man's mind. It is part of the defect of 
that instrument. We may watch against it and pre- 
vent it doing any great injustices, or leading us into 
follies, but to eradicate it is an altogether different 
matter. There it is, to be reckoned with, like the 

* Chapter the Seventh, 6. 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 313 

coccyx, the pineal eye, and the vermiform appendix. 
And a too consistent attack on it may lead simply to 
its inversion, to a vindictively pro-foreigner attitude 
that is equally unwise. 

The second sort of aggregatory ideas, running very 
often across the boundaries of national ideas and in 
conflict with them, are religious ideas. In Western 
Europe true national ideas only emerged to their present 
hectic vigour after the shock of the Reformation had 
liberated men from the great tradition of a Latin- 
speaking Christendom, a tradition the Roman Catholic 
Church has sustained as its modification of the old 
Latin-speaking Imperialism in the rule of the pontifex 
maximus. There was, and there remains to this day, 
a profound disregard of local dialect and race in the 
Roman Catholic tradition, which has made that Church 
a persistently disintegrating influence in national life. 
Equally spacious and equally regardless of tongues 
and peoples is the great Arabic-speaking religion of 
Mahomet. Both Christendom and Islam are indeed on 
their secular sides imperfect realisations of a Utopian 
World State. But the secular side was the weaker side 
of these cults ; they produced no sufficiently great 
statesmen to realise their spiritual forces, and it is not 
in Rome under pontifical rule, nor in Munster under 
the Anabaptists, but rather in Thomas a Kempis and 
Saint Augustin's City of God that we must seek for 
the Utopias of Christianity. 

In the last hundred years a novel development of 
material forces, and especially of means of communi- 



314 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

cation, has done very much to break up the isolations 
in which nationality perfected its prejudices and so to 
render possible the extension and consolidation of such 
a world-wide culture as mediaeval Christendom and 
Islam foreshadowed. The first onset of these expansive 
developments has been marked in the world of mind 
by an expansion of political ideals Comte's " Western 
Republic " (1848) was the first Utopia that involved 
the synthesis of numerous States by the development 
of " Imperialisms " in the place of national policies, 
and by the search for a basis for wider political unions 
in racial traditions and linguistic affinities. Anglo- 
Saxonism, Pan-Germanism, and the like are such syn- 
thetic ideas. Until the eighties, the general tendency of 
progressive thought was at one with the older Christian 
tradition which ignored " race," and the aim of the ex- 
pansive liberalism movement, so far as it had a clear aim, 
was to Europeanise the world, to extend the franchise 
to negroes, put Polynesians into trousers, and train the 
teeming myriads of India to appreciate the exquisite 
lilt of The Lady of the Lake. There is always some 
absurdity mixed with human greatness, and we must not 
let the fact that the middle Victorians counted Scott, 
the suffrage and pantaloons among the supreme blessings 
of life, conceal from us the very real nobility of their 
dream of England's mission to the world. . . . 

We of this generation have seen a flood of reaction 
against such universalism. The great intellectual de- 
velopments that centre upon the work of Darwin have 
exacerbated the realisation that life is a conflict be- 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 315 

tween superior and inferior types, it has underlined 
the idea that specific survival rates are of primary 
significance in the world's development, and a swarm 
of inferior intelligences has applied to human problems 
elaborated and exaggerated versions of these general- 
isations. These social and political followers of Darwin 
have fallen into an obvious confusion between race and 
nationality, and into the natural trap of patriotic con- 
ceit. The dissent of the Indian and Colonial governing 
class to the first crude applications of liberal propo- 
sitions in India has found a voice of unparalleled 
penetration in Mr. Kipling, whose want of intellectual 
deliberation is only equalled by his poietic power. The 
search for a basis for a new political synthesis in adap- 
table sympathies based on linguistic affinities, was 
greatly influenced by Max Miiller's unaccountable 
assumption that language indicated kindred, and led 
straight to wildly speculative ethnology, to the dis- 
covery that there was a Keltic race, a Teutonic race, 
an Indo-European race, and so forth. A book that 
has had enormous influence in this matter, because of 
its use in teaching, is J. R. Green's Short History of 
the English People, with its grotesque insistence upon 
Anglo-Saxonism. And just now, the world is in a sort 
of delirium about race and the racial struggle. The 
Briton forgetting his Defoe,* the Jew forgetting the 
very word proselyte, the German forgetting his anthro- 
pometric variations, and the Italian forgetting every- 
thing, are obsessed by the singular purity of their 

* The True-born Englishman. 



316 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

blood, and the danger of contamination the mere con- 
tinuance of other races involves. True to the law that 
all human aggregation involves the development of a 
spirit of opposition to whatever is external to the 
aggregation, extraordinary intensifications of racial 
definition are going on ; the vileness, the inhumanity, 
the incompatibility of alien races is being steadily 
exaggerated. The natural tendency of every human 
being towards a stupid conceit in himself and his kind, 
a stupid depreciation of all unlikeness, is traded upon 
by this bastard science. With the weakening of 
national references, and with the pause before recon- 
struction in religious belief, these new arbitrary and 
unsubstantial race prejudices become daily more for- 
midable. .They are shaping policies and modifying 
laws, and they will certainly be responsible for a large 
proportion of the wars, hardships, and cruelties the 
immediate future ,holds in store for our earth. 

No generalisations about race are too extravagant 
for the inflamed credulity of the present time. No 
attempt is ever made to distinguish differences in in- 
herent qualit}' the true racial differences from arti- 
ficial differences due to culture. No lesson seems ever 
to be drawn from history of the fluctuating incidence 
of the civilising process first upon this race and then 
upon that. The politically ascendant peoples of the 
present phase are understood to be the superior races, 
including such types as the Sussex farm labourer, the 
Bowery tough, the London hooligan, and the Paris 
apache ; the races not at present prospering politically, 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 317 

such as the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Spanish, the 
Moors, the Chinese, the Hindoos, the Peruvians, and 
all uncivilised people are represented as the inferior 
races, unfit to associate with the former on terms of 
equality, unfit to intermarry with them on any terms, 
unfit for any decisive voice in human affairs. In the 
popular imagination of Western Europe, the Chinese 
are becoming bright gamboge in colour, and unspeak- 
ably abominable in every respect ; the people who are 
black the people who have fuzzy hair and flattish 
noses, and no calves to speak of are no longer held 
to be within the pale of humanity. These superstitions 
work out along the obvious lines of the popular logic. 
The depopulation of the Congo Free State by the Bel- 
gians, the horrible massacres of Chinese by European 
soldiery during the Pekin expedition, are condoned 
as a painful but necessary part of the civilising process 
of the world. The world-wide repudiation of slavery 
in the nineteenth century was done against a vast sullen 
force of ignorant pride, which, reinvigorated by the 
new delusions, swings back again to power. 

" Science " is supposed to lend its sanction to race 
mania, but it is only " science " as it is understood by 
very illiterate people that does anything of the sort 
" scientists' " science, in fact. What science has to 
tell about " The Races of Man " will be found com- 
pactly set forth by Doctor J. Deinker, in the book 
published under that title.* From that book one may 

* See also an excellent paper in the American Journal of Sociology 
for March, 1904, The Psychology of Race Prejudice, by W. I. Thomas. 



318 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

learn the beginnings of race charity. Save for a few 
isolated pools of savage humanity, there is probably no 
pure race in the whole world. The great continental 
populations are all complex mixtures of numerous and 
fluctuating types. Even the Jews present every kind 
of skull that is supposed to be racially distinctive, a 
vast range of complexion from blackness in Goa, to 
extreme fairness in Holland and a vast mental and 
physical diversity. Were the Jews to discontinue all 
intermarriage with " other races " henceforth for ever, 
it would depend upon quite unknown laws of fecundity, 
prepotency, and variability, what their final type would 
be, or, indeed, whether any particular type would ever 
prevail over diversity. And, without going beyond the 
natives of the British Isles, one can discover an enormous 
range of types, tall and short, straight-haired and curly, 
fair and dark, supremely intelligent and unteachably 
stupid, straightforward, disingenuous, and what not. 
The natural tendency is to forget all this range directly 
" race " comes under discussion, to take either an average 
or some quite arbitary ideal as the type, and think 
only of that. The more difficult thing to do, but the 
thing that must be done if we are to get just results 
in this discussion, is to do one's best to bear the range 
in mind. 

Let us admit that the average Chinaman is probably 
different in complexion, and, indeed, in all his physical 
and psychical proportions, from the average English- 
man. Does that render their association upon terms 
of equality in a World State impossible ? What the 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 319 

average Chinaman or Englishman may be, is of no 
importance whatever to our plan of a World State. 
It is not averages that exist, but individuals. The 
average Chinaman will never meet the average English- 
man anywhere ; only individual Chinamen will meet 
individual Englishmen. Now among Chinamen will 
be found a range of variety as extensive as among 
Englishmen, and there is no single trait presented by 
all Chinamen and no Englishman, or vice versa. Even 
the oblique eye is not universal in China, and there 
are probably many Chinamen who might have been 
" changed at birth," taken away and educated into 
quite passable Englishmen. Even after we have 
separated out and allowed for the differences in carriage, 
physique, moral prepossessions, and so forth, due to 
their entirely divergent cultures, there remains, no 
doubt, a very great difference between the average 
Chinaman and the average Englishman ; but would 
that amount to a wider difference than is to be found 
between extreme types of Englishmen ? 

For my own part I do not think that it would. 
But it is evident that any precise answer can be 
made only when anthropology has adopted much 
more exact and exhaustive methods of inquiry, and 
a far more precise analysis than its present resources 
permit. 

Be it remembered how doubtful and tainted is the 
bulk of our evidence in these matters. These are 
extraordinarily subtle inquiries, from which few men 
succeed in disentangling the threads of their personal 



320 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

associations the curiously interwoven strands of self- 
love and self-interest that affect their inquiries. One 
might almost say that instinct fights against such 
investigations, as it does undoubtedly against many 
necessary medical researches. But while a long special 
training, a high tradition and the possibility of reward 
and distinction, enable the medical student to face 
many tasks that are at once undignified and physically 
repulsive, the people from whom we get our anthro- 
pological information are rarely men of more than 
average intelligence, and of no mental training at all. 
And the problems are far more elusive. It surely 
needs at least the gifts and training of a first-class 
novelist, combined with a sedulous patience that prob- 
ably cannot be hoped for in combination with these, 
to gauge the all-round differences between man and 
man. Even where there are no barriers of language 
and colour, understanding may be nearly impossible. 
How few educated people seem to understand the 
servant class in England, or the working men ! Except 
for Mr. Bart Kennedy's A Man Adrift, I know of 
scarcely any book that shows a really sympathetic 
and living understanding of the navvy, the longshore 
sailor man, the rough chap of our own race. Carica- 
tures, luridly tragic or gaily comic, in which the mis- 
conceptions of the author blend with the preconceptions 
of the reader and achieve success, are, of course, common 
enough. And then consider the sort of people who 
pronounce judgments on the moral and intellectual 
capacity of the negro, the Malay, or the Chinaman. 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 321 

You have missionaries, native schoolmasters, em- 
ployers of coolies, traders, simple downright men, who 
scarcely suspect the existence of any sources of error 
in their verdicts, who are incapable of understanding the 
difference between what is innate and what is acquired, 
much less of distinguishing them in their interplay. 
Now and then one seems to have a glimpse of something 
really living in Mary Kingsley's buoyant work, for 
instance and even that may be no more than my 
illusion. 

For my own part I am disposed to discount all adverse 
judgments and all statements of insurmountable differ- 
ences between race and race. I talk upon racial qualities 
to all men who have had opportunities of close observa- 
tion, and I find that their insistence upon these differences 
is usually in inverse proportion to their intelligence. It 
may be the chance of my encounters, but that is my 
clear impression. Common sailors will generalise in 
the profoundest way about Irishmen, and Scotchmen, 
and Yankees, and Nova Scotians, and " Dutchies," 
until one might think one talked of different species 
of animal, but the educated explorer flings clear of all 
these delusions. To him men present themselves in- 
dividualised, and if they classify it is by some skin- 
deep accident of tint, some trick of the tongue, or habit 
of gesture, or such-like superficiality. And after all 
there exists to-day available one kind at least of un- 
biassed anthropological evidence. There are photo- 
graphs. Let the reader turn over the pages of some 
such copiously illustrated work as The Living Races of 

ii 



322 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

Mankind* and look into the eyes of one alien face 
after another. Are they not very like the people one 
knows ? For the most part, one finds it hard to believe 
that, with a common language and common social 
traditions, one would not get on very well with these 
people. Here or there is a brutish or evil face, but 
you can find as brutish and evil in the Strand on any 
afternoon. There are differences no doubt, but funda- 
mental incompatibilities no ! And very many of them 
send out a ray of special resemblance and remind one 
more strongly of this friend or that, than they do of 
their own kind. One notes with surprise that one's 
good' friend and neighbour X and an anonymous naked 
Gold Coast negro belong to one type, as distinguished 
from one's dear friend Y and a beaming individual 
from Somaliland, who as certainly belong to another. 

In one matter the careless and prejudiced nature 
of accepted racial generalisations is particularly marked. 
A great and increasing number of people are persuaded 
that " half-breeds " are peculiarly evil creatures as 
hunchbacks and bastards were supposed to be in the 
middle ages. The full legend of the wickedness of 
the half-breed is best to be learnt from a drunken 
mean white from Virginia or the Cape. The half- 
breed, one hears, combines all the vices of either parent, 
he is wretchedly poor in health and spirit, but vin- 
dictive, powerful, and dangerous to an extreme degree, 
his morals the mean white has high and exacting 

* The Living Races of Mankind, by H. N. Hutchinson, J. W. 
Gregory, and R. Lydekker. (Hutchinson.) 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 323 

standards are indescribable even in whispers in a 
saloon, and so on, and so on. There is really not an 
atom of evidence an unprejudiced mind would accept 
to sustain any belief of the sort. There is nothing to 
show that the children of racial admixture are, as a 
class, inherently either better or worse in any respect 
than either parent. There is an equally baseless theory 
that they are better, a theory displayed to a fine degree 
of foolishness in the article on Shakespeare in the En- 
cyclop&dia Britannica. Both theories belong to the vast 
edifice of sham science that smothers the realities of 
modern knowledge. It may be that most " half-breeds " 
are failures in life, but that proves nothing. They are, 
in an enormous number of cases, illegitimate and outcast 
from the normal education of either race ; they are 
brought up in homes that are the battle-grounds of 
conflicting cultures ; they labour under a heavy premium 
of disadvantage. There is, of course, a passing sug- 
gestion of Darwin's to account for atavism that might 
go to support the theory of the vileness of half-breeds, 
if it had ever been proved. But, then, it never has been 
proved. There is no proof in the matter at all. 



3 

Suppose, now, there is such a thing as an all-round 
inferior race. Is that any reason why we should pro- 
pose to preserve it for ever in a condition of tutelage ? 



324 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

Whether there is a race so inferior I do not know, but 
certainly there is no race so superior as to be trusted 
with human charges. The true answer to Aristotle's 
plea for slavery, that there are " natural slaves," lies in 
the fact that there are no " natural " masters. Power 
is no more to be committed to men without discipline 
and restriction than alcohol. The true objection to 
slavery is not that it is unjust to the inferior but that 
it corrupts the superior. There is only one sane and 
logical thing to be done with a really inferior race, 
and that is to exterminate it. 

Now there are various ways of exterminating a race, 
and most of them are cruel. You may end it with 
fire and sword after the old Hebrew fashion ; you may 
enslave it and work it to death, as the Spaniards did 
the Caribs ; you may set it boundaries and then poison 
it slowly with deleterious Commodities, as the Americans 
do with most of their Indians ; you may incite it to 
wear clothing to which it is not accustomed and to 
live under new and strange conditions that will expose 
it to infectious diseases' to which you yourselves are 
immune, as the missionaries do the Polynesians ; you 
may resort to honest simple murder, as we English did 
with the Tasmanians ; or you can majntain such con- 
ditions as conduce to " race suicide," as the British 
administration does in Fiji. Suppose, then, for a 
moment, that there is an all-round inferior race ; a 
Modern Utopia is under the hard logic of life, and it 
would have to exterminate such a race as quickly as it 
could. On the whole, the Fijian device seems the 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 325 

least cruel. But Utopia would do that without any 
clumsiness of race distinction, in exactly the same 
manner, and by the same machinery, as it exterminates 
all its own defective and inferior strains ; that is to 
say, as we have already discussed in Chapter the Fifth, 
i, by its marriage laws, and by the laws of the mini- 
mum wage. That extinction need never be discrimi- 
natory. If any of the race did, after all, prove to be 
fit to survive, they would survive they would be 
picked out with a sure and automatic justice from the 
over-ready condemnation of all their kind. 

Is there, however, an all-round inferior race in the 
world ? Even the Australian black-fellow is, perhaps, 
not quite so entirely eligible for extinction as a good, 
wholesome, horse-racing, sheep-farming Australian white 
may think. These queer little races, the black fellows, 
the Pigmies, the Bushmen, may have their little gifts, 
a greater keenness, a greater fineness of this sense or 
that, a quaintness of the imagination or what not, that 
may serve as their little unique addition to the totality 
of our Utopian civilisation. We are supposing that 
every individual alive on earth is alive in Utopia, and so 
all the surviving " black-fellows " are there. Every one 
of them in Utopia has had what none have had on earth, 
a fair education and fair treatment, justice, and oppor- 
tunity. Suppose that the common idea is right about 
the general inferiority of these people, then it would 
follow that in Utopia most of them are childless, and 
working at or about the minimum wage, and some 
will have passed out of all possibility of offspring under 



326 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

the hand of the offended law ; but still cannot we 
imagine some few of these little people whom you must 
suppose neither naked nor clothed in the European 
style, but robed in the Utopian fashion may have 
found some delicate art to practise, some peculiar sort 
of carving, for example, that justifies God in creating 
them ? Utopia has sound sanitary laws, sound social 
laws, sound economic laws ; what harm are these people 
going to do ? 

Some may be even prosperous and admired, may 
have married women of their own or some other race, 
and so may be transmitting that distinctive thin thread 
of excellence, to take its due place in the great synthesis 
of the future. 

And, indeed, coming along that terrace in Utopia, 
I see a little figure, a little bright-eyed, bearded man, 
inky black, frizzy haired, and clad in a white tunic 
and black hose, and with a mantle of lemon yellow 
wrapped about his shoulders. He walks, as most 1 
Utopians walk, as though he had reason to be proud 
of something, as though he had no reason to be afraid 
of anything in the world. He carries a portfolio in 
his hand. It is that, I suppose, as much as his hair, 
that recalls the Quartier Latin to my mind. 



4 

I had already discussed the question of race with 
the botanist at Lucerne. 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 327 

" But you would not like," he cried in horror, " your 
daughter to marry a Chinaman or a negro ? " 

" Of course/' said I, " when you say Chinaman, you 
think of a creature with a pigtail, long nails, and in- 
sanitary habits, and when you say negro you think of a 
filthy-headed, black creature in an old hat. You do 
this because your imagination is too feeble to disen- 
tangle the inherent qualities of a thing from its habitual 
associations." 

" Insult isn't argument," said the botanist. 

" Neither is unsound implication. You make a ques- 
tion of race into a question of unequal cultures. You 
would not like your daughter to marry the sort of negro 
who steals hens, but then you would also not like your 
daughter to marry a pure English hunchback with a 
squint, or a drunken cab tout of Norman blood. As 
a matter of fact, very few well-bred English girls do 
commit that sort of indiscretion. But you don't think 
it necessary to generalise against men of your own race 
because there are drunken cab touts, and why should 
you generalise against negroes ? Because the proportion 
of undesirables is higher among negroes, that does not 
justify a sweeping condemnation. You may have to 
condemn most, but why all? There may be neither 
of us knows enough to deny negroes who are handsome, 
capable, courageous." 

" Ugh ! " said the botanist. 

" How detestable you must find Othello ! " 

It is my Utopia, and for a moment I could almost 
find it in my heart to spite the botanist by creating a 



328 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

modern Desclemona and her lover sooty black to the 
lips, there before our eyes. But I am not so sure of 
my case as that, and for the moment there shall come 
nothing more than a swart-faced, dusky Burmese woman 
in the dress of the Greater Rule, with her tall English- 
man (as he might be on earth) at her side. That, how- 
ever, is a digression from my conversation with the 
botanist. 

" And the Chinaman ? " said the botanist. 

" I think we shall have all the buff and yellow peoples 
intermingling pretty freely." 

" Chinamen and white women, for example." 

" Yes," I said, " you've got to swallow that, anyhow ; 
you shall swallow that." 

He finds the idea too revolting for comment. 

I try and make the thing seem easier for him. " Do 
try," I said, " to grasp a Modern Utopian's conditions. 
The Chinaman will speak the same language as his wife 
whatever her race may be he will wear costume of 
the common civilised fashion, he will have much the 
same education as his European rival, read the same 
literature, bow to the same traditions. And you must 
remember a wife in Utopia is singularly not subject to 
her husband. ..." 

The botanist proclaims his invincible conclusion : 
" Everyone would cut her ! " 

" This is Utopia," I said, and then sought once more 
to tranquilise his mind. " No doubt among the vulgar, 
coarse-minded people outside the Rule there may be 
something of the sort. Every earthly moral blockhead, 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 329 

a little educated, perhaps, is to be found in Utopia. 
You will, no doubt, find the ' cut ' and the ' boycott,' 
and all those nice little devices by which dull people 
get a keen edge on life, in their place here, and their 
place here is somewhere " 

I turned a thumb earthward. " There ! " 

The botanist did not answer for a little while. Then 
he said, with some temper and great emphasis : " Well, 
I'm jolly glad anyhow that I'm not to be a permanent 
resident in this Utopia, if our daughters are to be married 
to Hottentots by regulation. I'm jolly glad." 

He turned his back on me. 

Now did I say anything of the sort ? . . . 

I had to bring him, I suppose ; there's no getting 
away from him in this life. But, as I have already 
observed, the happy ancients went to their Utopias 
without this sort of company. 



5 

What gives the botanist so great an advantage in all 
his Anti-Utopian utterances is his unconsciousness of his 
own limitations. He thinks in little pieces that lie about 
loose, and nothing has any necessary link with anything 
else in his mind. So that I cannot retort upon him by 
asking him, if he objects to this synthesis of all nations, 
tongues and peoples in a World State, what alternative 
ideal he proposes. 

ir a 



330 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

People of this sort do not even feel the need of alter- 
natives. Beyond the scope of a few personal projects, 
meeting Her again, and things like that, they do not 
feel that there is a future. They are unencumbered by 
any baggage of convictions whatever, in relation to that. 
That, at least, is the only way in which I can explain 
our friend's high intellectual mobility. Attempts to 
correlate statesmanship, which they regard with interest 
as a dramatic interplay of personalities, with any secular 
movement of humanity, they class with the differential 
calculus and Darwinism, as things far too difficult to be 
anything but finally and subtly wrong. 

So the argument must pass into a direct address to 
the reader. 

If you are not prepared to regard a world-wide syn- 
thesis of all cultures and polities and races into one 
World State as the desirable end upon which all civilising 
efforts converge, what do you regard as the desirable 
end ? Synthesis, one may remark in passing, does not 
necessarily mean fusion, nor does it mean uniformity. 

The alternatives fall roughly under three headings. 
The first is to assume there is a best race, to define as 
well as one can that best race, and to regard all other 
races as material for extermination. This has a fine, 
modern, biological air (" Survival of the Fittest "). If 
you are one of those queer German professors who write 
insanity about Welt-Politik, you assume the best race 
is the " Teutonic " ; Cecil Rhodes affected that triumph 
of creative imagination, the " Anglo-Saxon race " ; my 
friend, Moses Cohen, thinks there is much to be said 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 331 

for the Jew. On its premises, this is a perfectly sound 
and reasonable policy, and it opens out a brilliant pros- 
pect for the scientific inventor for what one might call 
Welt-Apparat in the future, for national harrowing and 
reaping machines, and race-destroying fumigations. The 
great plain of China (" Yellow Peril ") lends itself par- 
ticularly to some striking wholesale undertaking ; it 
might, for example, be flooded for a few days, and then 
disinfected with volcanic chlorine. Whether, when all 
the inferior races have been stamped out, the superior 
race would not proceed at once, or after a brief millennial 
period of social harmony, to divide itself into sub-classes, 
and begin the business over again at a higher level, is an 
interesting residual question into which we need not 
now penetrate. 

That complete development of a scientific Welt-Politik 
is not, however, very widely advocated at present, no 
doubt from a want of confidence in the public imagina- 
tion. We have, however, a very audible and influential 
school, the Modern Imperialist school, which distinguishes 
its own race there is a German, a British, and an 
Anglo-Saxon section in the school, and a wider teaching 
which embraces the whole " white race " in one remark- 
able tolerance as the superior race, as one, indeed, 
superior enough to own slaves, collectively, if not in- 
dividually ; and the exponents of this doctrine look with 
a resolute, truculent, but slightly indistinct eye to a 
future in which all the rest of the world will be in sub- 
jection to these elect. The ideals of this type are set 
forth pretty clearly in Mr. Kidd's Control of the Tropics. 



332 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

The whole world is to be administered by the " white " 
Powers Mr. Kidd did not anticipate Japan who will 
see to it that their subjects do not " prevent the utilisa- 
tion of the immense natural resources which they have 
in charge." Those other races are to be regarded as 
children, recalcitrant children at times, and without any 
of the tender emotions of paternity. It is a little doubt- 
ful whether the races lacking " in the elementary qualities 
of social efficiency " are expected to acquire them under 
the chastening hands of those races which, through 
" strength and energy of character, humanity, probity, 
and integrity, and a single-minded devotion to concep- 
tions of duty," are developing " the resources of the 
richest regions of the earth " over their heads, or whether 
this is the ultimate ideal. 

Next comes the rather incoherent alternative that one 
associates in England with official Liberalism. 

Liberalism in England is not quite the same thing as 
Liberalism in the rest of the world ; it is woven of two 
strands. There is Whiggism, the powerful tradition of 
seventeenth-century Protestant and republican England, 
with its great debt to republican Rome, its strong con- 
structive and disciplinary bias, its broad and originally 
very living and intelligent outlook ; and interwoven with 
this there is the sentimental and logical Liberalism that 
sprang from the stresses of the eighteenth century, that 
finds its early scarce differentiated expression in Har- 
rington's Oceana, and after fresh draughts of the tradi- 
tion of Brutus and Cato and some elegant trifling with 
noble savages, budded in La CiU Morellyste. flowered in 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 333 

the emotional democratic naturalism of Rousseau, and 
bore abundant fruit in the French Revolution. These 
are two very distinct strands. Directly they were freed 
in America from the grip of conflict with British Toryism, 
they came apart as the Republican and Democratic 
parties respectively. Their continued union in Great 
Britain is a political accident. Because of this mixture, 
the whole career of English-speaking Liberalism, though 
it has gone to one unbroken strain of eloquence, has 
never produced a clear statement of policy in relation 
to other peoples politically less fortunate. It has de- 
veloped no definite ideas at all about the future of man- 
kind. The Whig disposition, which once had some play 
in India, was certainly to attempt to anglicise the 
" native," to assimilate his culture, and then to assimi- 
late his political status with that of his temporary ruler. 
But interwoven with this anglicising tendency, which 
was also, by the bye, a Christianising tendency, was a 
strong disposition, derived from the Rousseau strand, to 
leave other peoples alone, to facilitate even the separation 
and autonomy of detached portions of our own peoples, 
to disintegrate finally into perfect, because lawless, in- 
dividuals. The official exposition of British " Liberal- 
ism " to-day still wriggles unstably because of these 
conflicting constituents, but on the whole the Whig 
strand now seems the weaker. The contemporary 
Liberal politician offers cogent criticism upon the bru- 
tality and conceit of modern imperialisms, but that 
seems to be the limit of his service. Taking what they 
do not say and do not propose as an indication of Liberal 



334 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

intentions, it would seem that the ideal of the British 
Liberals and of the American Democrats is to favour 
the existence of just as many petty, loosely allied, or 
quite independent nationalities as possible, just as many 
languages as possible, to deprecate armies and all con- 
trols, and to trust to the innate goodness of disorder 
and the powers of an ardent sentimentality to keep the 
world clean and sweet. The Liberals will not face the 
plain consequence that such a state of affairs is hopelessly 
unstable, that it involves the maximum risk of war with 
the minimum of permanent benefit and public order. 
They will not reflect that the stars in their courses rule 
inexorably against it. It is a vague, impossible ideal, 
with a rude sort of unworldly moral beauty, like the gospel 
of the Doukhobors. Besides that charm it has this most 
seductive quality to an official British Liberal, that it 
does not exact intellectual activity nor indeed activity 
of any sort whatever. It is, by virtue of that alone, a 
far less mischievous doctrine than the crude and violent 
Imperialism of the popular Press. 

Neither of these two schools of policy, neither the 
international laisser faire of the Liberals, nor " hustle 
to the top " Imperialism, promise any reality of per- 
manent progress for the world of men. They are the 
resort, the moral reference, of those who will not think 
frankly and exhaustively over the whole field of this 
question. Do that, insist upon solutions of more than 
accidental applicability, and you emerge with one or 
other of two contrasted solutions, as the consciousness 
of kind or the consciousness of individuality prevails 



RACE IN UTOPIA. 335 

in your mind. In the former case you will adopt aggres- 
sive Imperialism, but you will carry it out to its " thor- 
ough " degree of extermination. You will seek to develop 
the culture and power of your kind of men and women 
to the utmost in order to shoulder all other kinds from 
the earth. If on the other hand you appreciate the 
unique, you will aim at such a synthesis as this Utopia 
displays, a synthesis far more credible and possible than 
any other Welt-Politik. In spite of all the pageant of 1 
modern war, synthesis is in the trend of the world. To | 
aid and develop it, could be made the open and secure 
policy of any great modern empire now. Modern war, 
modern international hostility is, I believe, possible only 
through the stupid illiteracy of the mass of men and the 
conceit and intellectual indolence of rulers and those 
who feed the public mind. Were the will of the mass 
of men lit and conscious, I am firmly convinced it would 
now burn steadily for synthesis and peace. 

It would be so easy to bring about a world peace\ 
within a few decades, was there but the will for it among i 
men ! The great empires that exist need but a little j 
speech and frankness one with another. Within, the 
riddles of social order are already half solved in books 
and thought, there are the common people and the 
subject peoples to be educated and drilled, to be led to 
a common speech and a common literature, to be assimi- 
lated and made citizens ; without, there is the possi- 
bility of treaties. Why, for example, should Britain and 
France, or either and the United States, or Sweden and 
Norway, or Holland, or Denmark, or Italy, fight any 



336 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

more for ever ? And if there is no reason, how foolish 
and dangerous it is still to sustain linguistic differences 
and custom houses, and all sorts of foolish and irritating 
distinctions between their various citizens ! Why should 
not all these peoples agree to teach some common lan- 
guage, French, for example, in their common schools, 
or to teach each other's languages reciprocally ? Why 
should they not aim at a common literature, and bring 
their various common laws, their marriage laws, and so 
on, into uniformity ? Why should they not work for a 
uniform minimum of labour conditions through all their 
communities ? Why, then, should they not except in 
the interests of a few rascal plutocrats trade freely and 
exchange their citizenship freely throughout their common 
boundaries ? No doubt there are difficulties to be found, 
but they are quite finite difficulties. What is there to 
prevent a parallel movement of all the civilised Powers in 
the world towards a common ideal and assimilation ? 

Stupidity nothing but stupidity, a stupid brute 
jealousy, aimless and unjustifiable. 

The coarser conceptions of aggregation are at hand, 
the hostile, jealous patriotisms, the blare of trumpets 
and the pride of fools ; they serve the daily need though 
they lead towards disaster. The real and the immediate 
has us in its grip, the accidental personal thing. The 
little effort of thought, the brief sustained effort of will, 
is too much for the contemporary mind. Such treaties, 
such sympathetic international movements, are but 
dream stuff yet on earth, though Utopia has realised 
them long since and already passed them by. 




/. . , I. ^ +- 



CHAPTER THE ELEVENTH 

THE BUBBLE BURSTS 
I 

A I walk back along the river terrace to the hotel 
where the botanist awaits me, and observe the 
Utopians I encounter, I have no thought that my tenure 
of Utopia becomes every moment more precarious. 
There float in my mind vague anticipations of more talks 
with my double and still more, of a steady elaboration 
of detail, of interesting journeys of exploration. I forget 
that a Utopia is a thing of the imagination that becomes 
more fragile with every added circumstance, that, like a 
soap-bubble, it is most brilliantly and variously, coloured 
at the very instant of its dissolution. This Utopia is 
nearly done. All the broad lines of its social organisa- 
tion are completed now, the discussion of all its general 
difficulties and problems. Utopian individuals pass me 
by, fine buildings tower on either hand ; it does not 
occur to me that I may look too closely. To find the 
people assuming the concrete and individual, is not, as 
I fondly imagine, the last triumph of realisation, but the 
swimming moment of opacity before the film gives way. 



AJ/A 



Hi AtoV* 



338 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

To come to individual emotional cases, is to return to 
the earth. 

I find the botanist sitting at a table in the hotel court- 
yard. 

" Well ? "I say, standing before him. 

" I've been in the gardens on the river terrace," he 
answers, " hoping I might see her again." 

" Nothing better to do ? " 

" Nothing in the world." 

" You'll have your double back from India to-morrow. 
Then you'll have conversation." 

" I don't want it," he replies, compactly. 

I shrug my shoulders, and he adds, " At least with 
him." 

I let myself down into a seat beside him. 

For a time I sit restfully enjoying his companionable 
silence, and thinking fragmentarily of those samurai and 
their Rules. I entertain something of the satisfaction of 
a man who has finished building a bridge ; I feel that 
I have joined together things that I had never joined 
before. My Utopia seems real to me, very real, I can 
believe in it, until the metal chair-back gives to my 
shoulder blades, and Utopian sparrows twitter and hop 
before my feet. I have a pleasant moment of un- 
hesitating self-satisfaction ; I feel a shameless exultation 
to be there. For a moment I forget the consideration 
the botanist demands ; the mere pleasure of complete- 
ness, of holding and controlling all the threads pos- 
sesses me. 

" You will persist in believing," I say, with an aggres- 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 339 

sive expository note, " that if you meet this lady she 
will be a person with the memories and sentiments of 
her double on earth. You think she will understand 
and pity, and perhaps love you. Nothing of the sort is 
the case." I repeat with confident rudeness, " Nothing 
of the sort is the case. Things are different altogether 
here ; you can hardly tell even now how different 
are " 

I discover he is not listening to me. 

" What is the matter ? " I ask abruptly. 

He makes no answer, but his expression startles me. 

" What is the matter ? " and then I follow his eyes. 

A woman and a man are coming through the great 
archway and instantly I guess what has happened. 
She it is arrests my attention first long ago I knew 
she was a sweetly beautiful woman. She is fair, with 
frank blue eyes, that look with a sort of tender recep- 
tivity into her companion's face. For a moment or so 
they remain, greyish figures in the cool shadow, against 
the sunlit greenery of the gardens beyond. 

"It is Mary," the botanist whispers with white lips, 
but he stares at the form of the man. His face whitens, 
it becomes so transfigured with emotion that for a 
moment it does not look weak. Then I see that his 
thin hand is clenched. 

I realise how little I understand his emotions 

A sudden fear of what he will do takes hold of me. 
He sits white and tense as the two come into the clearer 
light of the courtyard. The man, I see, is one of the 
samurai, a dark, strong-faced man, a man I have never 



340 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

seen before, and she is wearing the robe that shows her 
a follower of the Lesser Rule. 

Some glimmering of the botanist's feelings strikes 
through to my slow sympathies. Of course a strange 
man ! I put out a restraining hand towards his arm. 
" I told you," I say, " that very probably, most prob- 
ably, she would have met some other. I tried to prepare 
you." 

" Nonsense," he whispers, without looking at me. 
" It isn't that. It's that scoundrel " 

He has an impulse to rise. " That scoundrel," he 
repeats. 

" He isn't a scoundrel," I say. " How do you know ? 
Keep still ! Why are you standing up ? " 

He and I stand up quickly, I as soon as he. But 
now the full meaning of the group has reached me. I 
grip his arm. " Be sensible," I say, speaking very 
quickly, and with my back to the approaching couple. 
" He's not a scoundrel here. This world is different 
from that. It's caught his pride somehow and made a 
man of him. Whatever troubled them there " 

He turns a face of white wrath on me, of accusa- 
tion, and for the moment of unexpected force. " This 
is your doing," he says. " You have done this to 
mock me. He of all men ! " For a moment speech 
fails him, then ; " You you have done this to mock 
me." 

I try to explain very quickly. My tone is almost 
propitiatory. 

" I never thought of it until now. But he's How 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 341 

did I know he was the sort of man a disciplined world 

(has a use for ? " 
He makes no answer, but he looks at me with eyes 
that are positively baleful, and in the instant I read 
his mute but mulish resolve that Utopia must 
end. 

" Don't let that old quarrel poison all this," I say 
almost entreatingly. " It happened all differently here 
everything is different here. Your double will be back 
to-morrow. Wait for him. Perhaps then you will under- 
stand " 

He shakes his head, and then bursts out with, " What 
do I want with a double ? Double ! What do I care 
if things have been different here ? This " 

He thrusts me weakly back with his long, white hand. 
" My God ! " he says almost forcibly, " what nonsense 
all this is ! All these dreams ! All Utopias ! There 

she is ! Oh, but I have dreamt of her ! And 

now " 

A sob catches him. I am really frightened by this 
time. I still try to keep between him and these 
Utopians, and to hide his gestures from them. 

" It's different here," I persist. " It's different here. 
The emotion you feel has no place in it. It's a scar 
from the earth the sore scar of your past " 

" And what are we all but scars ? What is life but 
a scarring ? It's you you who don't understand ! Of 
course we are covered with scars, we live to be scarred, 
we are scars 1 We are the scars of the past ! These 
dreams, these childish dreams ! " 



342 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

He does not need to finish his sentence, he waves 
an unteachable destructive arm. 

My Utopia rocks about me. 

For a moment the vision of that great courtyard 
hangs real. There the Utopians live real about me, 
going to and fro, and the great archway blazes with 
sunlight from the green gardens by the riverside. The 
man who is one of the samurai, and his lady, whom 
the botanist loved on earth, pass out of sight behind 
the marble flower-set Triton that spouts coolness in 
the middle of the place. For a moment I see two 
working men in green tunics sitting on a marble seat 
in the shadow of the colonnade, and a sweet little silver- 
haired old lady, clad all in violet, and carrying a book, 
comes towards us, and lifts a curious eye at the botanist's 
gestures. And then - 

" Scars of the past ! Scars of the past ! These 
fanciful, useless dreams ! " 



There is no jerk, no sound, no hint of material shock. 
We are in London, and clothed in the fashion of the 
town. The sullen roar of London fills our ears. . . . 

I see that I am standing beside an iron seat of poor 
design in that grey and gawky waste of asphalte 
Trafalgar Square, and the botanist, with perplexity in 
his face, stares from me to a poor, shrivelled, dirt-lined 
old woman my God ! what a neglected thing she is ! 
who proffers a box of matches. . . . 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 343 

He buys almost mechanically, and turns back to me. 

" I was saying," he says, " the past rules us absolutely. 
These dreams " 

His sentence does not complete itself. He looks 
nervous and irritated. 

" You have a trick at times," he says instead, " of 
making your suggestions so vivid " 

He takes a plunge. " If you don't mind," he says in 
a sort of quavering ultimatum, " we won't discuss that 
aspect of the question the lady, I mean further." 

He pauses, and there still hangs a faint perplexity 
between us. 

" But "I begin. 

For a moment we stand there, and my dream of 
Utopia runs off me like water from an oiled slab. Of 
course we lunched at our club. We came back from 
Switzerland by no dream train but by the ordinary 
Bale express. We have been talking of that Lucerne 
woman he harps upon, and I have made some novel 
comment on his story. I have touched certain possi- 
bilities. 

" You can't conceivably understand," he says. 

" The fact remains," he goes on, taking up the thread 
of his argument again with an air of having denned our 
field, " we are the scars of the past. That's a thing 
one can discuss without personalities." 

" No," I say rather stupidly, " no." 

:< You are always talking as though you could kick 
the past to pieces ; as though one could get right out 
from oneself and begin afresh. It is your weakness 



344 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

if you don't mind my being frank it makes you seem 
harsh and dogmatic. Life has gone easily for you ; 
you have never been badly tried. You have been 
lucky you do not understand the other way about. 
You are hard." 

I answer nothing. 

He pants for breath. I perceive that in our discus- 
sion of his case I must have gone too far, and that he 
has rebelled. Clearly I must have said something 
wounding about that ineffectual love story of his. 

" You don't allow for my position," he says, and it 
occurs to me to say, " I'm obliged to look at the thing 
from my own point of view. ..." 

One or other of us makes a move. What a lot of 
filthy, torn paper is scattered about the world ! We 
walk slowly side by side towards the dirt-littered basin 
of the fountain, and stand regarding two grimy tramps 
who sit and argue on a further seat. One holds a hor- 
rible old boot in his hand, and gesticulates with it, 
while his other hand caresses his rag-wrapped foot. 
" Wot does Cham'lain si P " his words drift to us. " \V'y 
'e says, wot's the good of 'nvesting your kepital where 
these 'ere Americans may dump it flat any time they 
like. . . ." 

(Were there not two men in green sitting on a marble 
seat ?) 

3 

We walk on, our talk suspended, past a ruthlessly 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 345 

clumsy hoarding, towards where men and women and 
children are struggling about a string of omnibuses. 
A newsvendor at the corner spreads a newspaper placard 
upon the wood pavement, pins the corners down with 
stones, and we glimpse something about : 

MASSACRE IN ODESSA. 
DISCOVERY OF HUMAN REMAINS AT CHERTSEY. 

SHOCKING LYNCHING OUTRAGE IN NEW 
YORK STATE. 

GERMAN INTRIGUES GET A SET-BACK. 
THE BIRTHDAY HONOURS. FULL LIST. 

Dear old familiar world ! 

An angry parent in conversation with a sympathetic 
friend jostles against us. " I'll knock his blooming 
young 'ed orf if 'e cheeks me again. It's these 'ere 
brasted Board Schools " 

An omnibus passes, bearing on a board beneath an 
incorrectly drawn Union Jack an exhortation to the 
true patriot to " Buy Bumper's British-Boiled Jam." . . . 

I am stunned beyond the possibility of discussion 
for a space. In this very place it must have been that 
the high terrace ran with the gardens below it, along 
which I came from my double to our hotel. I am 
going back, but now through reality, along the path 
I passed so happily in my dream. And the people I 
saw then are the people I am looking at now with a 
difference. 



346 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

The botanist walks beside me, white and nervously 
jerky in his movements, his ultimatum delivered. 

We start to cross the road. An open carriage drives 
by, and we see a jaded, red-haired woman, smeared with 
paint, dressed in furs, and petulantly discontented. 
Her face is familiar to me, her face, with a difference. 

Why do I think of her as dressed in green ? 

Of course ! she it was I saw leading her children 
by the hand ! 

Comes a crash to our left, and a running of people 
to see a cab-horse down on the slippery, slanting pave- 
ment outside St. Martin's Church. 

V/e go on up the street. 

A heavy-eyed young Jewess, a draggled prostitute 
no crimson flower for her hair, poor girl ! regards us 
with a momentary speculation, and we get a whiff of 
foul language from two newsboys on the kerb. 

" We can't go on talking," the botanist begins, and 
ducks aside just in time to save his eye from the ferule 
of a stupidly held umbrella. He is going to treat our 
little tiff about that lady as closed. He has the air 
of picking up our conversation again at some earlier 
point. 

He steps into the gutter, walks round outside a negro 
hawker, just escapes the wheel of a hansom, and comes 
to my side again. 

" We can't go on talking of your Utopia," he says, 
" in a noise and crowd like this." 

We are separated by a portly man going in the oppo- 
site direction, and join again. " We can't go on talking 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 347 

of Utopia," he repeats, " in London. . . . Up in the 
mountains and holiday-time it was all right. We let 
ourselves go 1 " 

" I've been living in Utopia," I answer, tacitly adopt- 
ing his tacit proposal to drop the lady out of the question. 

" At times," he says, with a queer laugh, " you've 
almost made me live there too." 

He reflects. " It doesn't do, you know. No ! And 
I don't know whether, after all, I want " 

We are separated again by half-a-dozen lifted flag- 
stones, a burning brazier, and two engineers concerned 
with some underground business or other in the busiest 
hour of the day's traffic. 

" Why shouldn't it do ? " I ask. 

" It spoils the world of everyday to let your mind 
run on impossible perfections." 

" I wish," I shout against the traffic, " I could smash 
the world of everyday." 

My note becomes quarrelsome. " You may accept 
this as the world of reality, you may consent to be one 
scar in an ill-dressed compound wound, but so not 1 1 
This is a dream too this world. Your dream, and you 
bring me back to it out of Utopia- " 

The crossing of Bow Street gives me pause again. 

The face of a girl who is passing westward, a student 
girl, rather carelessly dressed, her books in a carrying- 
strap, comes across my field of vision. The westward 
sun of London glows upon her face. She has eyes that 
dream, surely no sensuous nor personal dream. 

After all, after all, dispersed, hidden, disorganised, 



348 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

undiscovered, unsuspected even by themselves, the 
samurai of Utopia are in this world, the motives that 
are developed and organised there stir dumbly here and 
stifle in ten thousand futile hearts. . . . 

I overtake the botanist, who got ahead at the crossing 
by the advantage of a dust-cart. 

" You think this is real because you can't wake out 
of it," I say. " It's all a dream, and there are people 
I'm just one of the first of a multitude between sleep- 
ing and waking who will presently be rubbing it out of 
their eyes." 

A pinched and dirty little girl, with sores upon her 
face, stretches out a bunch of wilting violets, in a piti- 
fully thin little fist, and interrupts my speech. " Bunch 
o' vi'lets on'y a penny." 

" No ! " I say curtly, hardening my heart. 

A ragged and filthy nursing mother, with her last 
addition to our Imperial People on her arm, comes out 
of a drinkshop, and stands a little unsteadily, and wipes 
mouth and nose comprehensively with the back of a red 
chapped hand. . . . 



4 

" Isn't thai reality ? " says the botanist, almost 
triumphantly, and leaves me aghast at his triumph. 

" That 1 " I say belatedly. " It's a thing in a night- 
mare ! " 

He shakes his head and smiles exasperatingly. 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 349 

I perceive quite abruptly that the botanist and I 
have reached the limits of our intercourse. 

" The world dreams things like that," I say, " because 
it suffers from an indigestion of such people as you." 

His low-toned self-complacency, like the faded banner 
of an obstinate fort, still flies unconquered. And you 
know, he's not even a happy man with it all ! 

For ten seconds or more I am furiously seeking in 
my mind for a word, for a term of abuse, for one com- 
pendious verbal missile that shall smash this man for 
ever. It has to express total inadequacy of imagina- 
tion and will, spiritual anaemia, dull respectability, gross 
sentimentality, a cultivated pettiness of heart. . . . 

That word will not come. But no other word will 
do. Indeed the word does not exist. There is nothing 
with sufficient vituperative concentration for this moral 
and intellectual stupidity of educated people. . . 

" Er " he begins. 

No ! I can't endure him. 

With a passionate rapidity of movement, I leave his 
side, dart between a carriage and a van, duck under 
the head of a cab-horse, and board a 'bus going west- 
ward somewhere but anyhow, going in exactly the 
reverse direction to the botanist. I clamber up the steps 
and thread my swaying way to the seat immediately 
behind the driver. 

" There ! " I say, as I whack myself down on the 
seat and pant. 

When I look round the botanist is out of sight. 



350 A MODERN UTOPIA. 



5 

But I am back in the world for all that, and my Utopia 
is done. 

It is good discipline for the Utopist to visit this world 
occasionally. 

But from the front seat on the top of an omnibus 
on a sunny September afternoon, the Strand, and Char- 
ing Cross corner, and Whitehall, and the great multitude 
of people, the great uproar of vehicles, streaming in all 
directions, is apt to look a world altogether too formi- 
dable. It has a glare, it has a tumult and vigour that 
shouts one down. It shouts one down, if shouting is to 
carry it. What good was it to trot along the pave- 
ment through this noise and tumult of life, pleading 
Utopia to that botanist ? What good would it be to 
recommend Utopia in this driver's preoccupied ear ? 

There are moments in the life of every philosopher 
and dreamer when he feels himself the flimsiest of absur- 
dities, when the Thing in Being has its way with him, 
its triumphant way, when it asks in a roar, unanswer- 
ably, with a fine solid use of the current vernacular, 
" What Good is all this Rot about Utopias ? " 

One inspects the Thing in Being with something of 
the diffident speculation of primitive man, peering from 
behind a tree at an angry elephant. 

(There is an omen in that image. On how many 
occasions must that ancestor of ours have had just the 
Utopist's feeline: of ambitious unreality, have decided 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 351 

that on the whole it was wiser to go very quietly home 
again, and leave the big beast alone ? But, in the end, 
men rode upon the elephant's head, and guided him 
this way or that. . . . The Thing in Being that roars 
so tremendously about Charing Cross corner seems a 
bigger antagonist than an elephant, but then we have 
better weapons than chipped flint blades. . . .) 

After all, in a very little time everything that im- 
presses me so mightily this September afternoon will 
have changed or passed away for ever, everything. 
These omnibuses, these great, stalwart, crowded, many- 
coloured things that jostle one another, and make so 
handsome a clatter-clamour, will all have gone ; they 
and their horses and drivers and organisation ; you will 
come here and you will not find them. Something else 
will be here, some different sort of vehicle, that is now 
perhaps the mere germ of an idea in some engineer 
student's brain. And this road and pavement will have 
changed, and these impressive great buildings ; other 
buildings will be here, buildings that are as yet more 
impalpable than this page you read, more formless and 
flimsy by far than anything that is reasoned here. Little 
plans sketched on paper, strokes of a pen or of a brush, 
will be the first materialisations of what will at last 
obliterate every detail and atom of these re-echoing 
actualities that overwhelm us now. And the clothing 
and gestures of these innumerable people, the character 
of their faces and bearing, these too will be recast in 
the spirit of what are now obscure and impalpable be- 
ginnings. 



352 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

The new things will be indeed of the substance ci 
the thing that is, but differing just in the measure of 
the will and imagination that goes to make them. They 
will be strong and fair as the will is sturdy and organ- 
ised and the imagination comprehensive and bold ; they 
will be ugly and smeared with WTetchedness as the will 
is fluctuating and the imagination timid and mean. 

Indeed Will is stronger than Fact, it can mould and 
overcome Fact. But this world has still to discover its 
will, it is a world that slumbers inertly, and all this 
roar and pulsation of life is no more than its heavy 
breathing. . . . My mind runs on to the thought of an 
awakening. 

As my omnibus goes lumbering up Cockspur Street 
through the clatter rattle of the cabs and carriages, 
there comes another fancy in my mind. . . . Could one 
but realise an apocalyptic image and suppose an angel, 
such as was given to each of the seven churches of Asia, 
given for a space to the service of the Greater Rule. 
I see him as a towering figure of flame and colour, stand- 
ing between earth and sky, with a trumpet in his hands, 
over there above the Haymarket, against the October 
glow ; and when he sounds, all the samurai, all who 
are samurai in Utopia, will know themselves and ons, 
another. . . . 

(Whup ! says a motor brougham, and a policemar. 
stays the traffic with his hand.) 

All of us who partake of the samurai would know ' 
ourselves and one another ! 

For a moment I have a vision of this resurrection of 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 353 

the living, of a vague, magnificent answer, of countless 
myriads at attention, of all that is fine in humanity at 
attention, round the compass of the earth. 

Then that philosophy of individual uniqueness re- 
sumes its sway over my thoughts, and my dream of 
a world's awakening fades. 

I had forgotten. . . . 

Things do not happen like that. God is not simple, 
God is not theatrical, the summons comes to each man 
in its due time for him, with an infinite subtlety of 
variety. . . . 

If that is so, what of my Utopia ? 

This infinite world must needs be flattened to get it 
on one retina. The picture of a solid thing, although 
it is flattened and simplified, is not necessarily a lie. 
Surely, surely, in the end, by degrees, and steps, some- 
thing of this sort, some such understanding, as this 
Utopia must come. First here, then there, single men 
and then groups of men will fall into line not indeed 
with my poor faulty hesitating suggestions but with 
a great and comprehensive plan wrought out by many 
minds and in many tongues. It is just because my 
plan is faulty, because it mis-states so much, and omits 
so much, that they do not now fall in. It will not be 
like my dream, the world that is coming. My dream 
is just my own poor dream, the thing sufficient for me. 
We fail in comprehension, we fail so variously and abun- 
dantly. We see as much as it is serviceable for us to 
see, and we see no further. But the fresh undaunted 
generations come to take on our work beyond our ut- 

12 



354 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

most effort, beyond the range of our ideas. They will 
learn with certainty things that to us are guesses and 
riddles. . . . 

There will be many Utopias. Each generation will 
have its new version of Utopia, a little more certain 
and complete and real, with its problems lying closer 
and closer to the problems of the Thing in Being. Until 
at last from dreams Utopias will have come to be work- 
ing drawings, and the whole world will be shaping the 
final World State, the fair and great and fruitful World 
State, that will only not be a Utopia because it will 
*be this world. So surely it must be 

The policeman drops his hand. " Come up," says the 
'bus driver, and the horses strain ; " Glitter, clatter, cluck, 
dak," the line of hurrying hansoms overtakes the omnibus 
going west. A dexterous lad on a bicycle with a bale of 
newspapers on his back dodges nimbly across the head of 
the column and vanishes up a side street. 

The omnibus sways forward. Rapt and prophetic, his 
plump hands clasped round the handle of his umbrella, 
his billycock hat a trifle askew, this irascible little man of 
the Voice, this impatient dreamer, this scolding Optimist, 
who has argued so rudely and dogmatically about eco- 
nomics and philosophy and decoration, and indeed about 
everything under the sun, who has been so hard on the 
botanist and fashionable women, and so reluctant in the 
matter of beer, is carried onward, dreaming dreams, dreams 
that with all the inevitable ironies of difference, may be 
realities when you and I are dreams. 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 355 

He passes, and for a little space we are left with his 
egoisms and idiosyncrasies more or less in suspense. 

But why was he intruded? you ask. Why could not 
a modern Utopia be discussed without this impersonation 
impersonally? It has confused the book, you say, 
made the argument hard to follow, and thrown a quality 
of insincerity over the whole. Are we but mocking at 
Utopias, you demand, using all these noble and gener- 
alised hopes as the backcloth against which two bickering 
personalities jar and squabble? Do I mean we are never 
to view the promised land again except through a fore- 
ground of fellow-travellers ? There is a common notion 
that the reading of a Utopia should end with a swelling 
heart and clear resolves, with lists of names, formation 
of committees, and even the commencement of subscriptions. 
But this Utopia began upon a philosophy of fragmenta-' 
tion, and ends, confusedly, amidst a gross tumult of imme- 
diate realities, in dust and doubt, with, at ih,e best, one 
individual's aspiration. Utopias were once in good faith, 
projects for a fresh creation of the world and of a most 
unworldly completeness; this so-called Modern Utopia is 
a mere story of personal adventures among Utopian phil- 
osophies. 

Indeed, that came about without the writer's intention. 
So it was the summoned vision came. For I see about 
me a great multitude of little souls and groups of souls 
as darkened, as derivative as my own ; -with the passage 
of years I understand more and more clearly the quality 
of the motives that urge me and urge them to do what- 
ever we do. . . . Yet that is not all I see, and I am not 



356 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

altogether bounded by my littleness. Ever and again, 
contrasting with this immediate vision, come glimpses of 
a comprehensive scheme, in which these personalities float, 
the scheme of a synthetic wider being, the great State, 
mankind, in which we all move and go, like blood 
corpuscles, like nerve cells, it may be at times like brain 
cells, in the body of a man. But the two visions are not 
seen consistently together, at least by me, and I do not 
surely know that they exist consistently together. The 
motives needed for those wider issues come not into the 
interplay of my vanities and wishes. That greater scheme 
lies about the men and women I know, as I have tried 
to make the vistas and spaces, the mountains, cities, laws, 
and order of Utopia lie about my talking couple, too great 
for their sustained comprehension. When one focuses 
upon these two that wide landscape becomes indistinct and 
distant, and when one regards that then the real persons 
one knows grow vague and unreal. Nevertheless, I cannot 
separate these two aspects of human life, each commenting 
on the other. In that incongruity between great and in- 
dividual inheres the incompatibility I could not resolve, 
and which, therefore, I have had to present in this con- 
flicting form. At times that great scheme does seem to 
me to enter certain men's lives as a passion, as a real 
and living motive ; there are those who know it almost as 
if it was a thing of desire ; even for me, upon occasion, 
the little lures of the immediate life are seen small and 
vain, and the soul goes out to that mighty Being, to appre- 
hend it and serve it and possess. But this is an illumina- 
tion that passes as it comes, a rare transitory lucidity, 



THE BUBBLE BURSTS. 357 

leaving the soul's desire suddenly turned to presumption 
and hypocrisy upon the lips. One grasps at the Universe 
and attains Bathos. The hungers, the jealousies, the 
prejudices and habits have us again, and we are forced 
back to think that it is so, and not otherwise, that we are 
meant to serve the mysteries ; that in these blinkers it is 
we are driven to an end we cannot understand. And 
then, for measured moments in the night watches or as 
one walks alone or while one sits in thought and speech 
with a friend, the wider aspirations glow again with a 
sincere emotion, with the colours of attainable desire. . . . 
That is my all about Utopia, and about the desire and 
need for Utopia, and how that planet lies to this planet 
that bears the daily lives of men. 



APPENDIX. 
SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 

A PORTION OF A PAPER READ TO THE OXFORD PHILOSOPHICAL SOCIETY, 
NOVEMBER 8, 1903, AND REPRINTED, WITH SOME REVISION, FROM 
THE VERSION GIVEN IN Mind, vol. xiii. (N.S.), No. 51. 

(See also Chapter I., 6, and Chapter X., i and 2.) 

IT seems to me that I may most propitiously attempt to 
interest yju this evening by describing very briefly the 
particular metaphysical and philosophical system in 
which I do my thinking, and more particularly by set- 
ting out for your consideration one or two points in 
which I seem to myself to differ most widely from current 
accepted philosophy. 

You must be prepared for things that will strike you 
as crude, for a certain difference of accent and dialect 
that you may not like, and you must be prepared too 
to hear what may strike you as the clumsy statement 
of my ignorant rediscovery of things already beauti- 
fully thought out and said. But in the end you may 
incline to forgive me some of this first offence. . . . 
It is quite unavoidable that, in setting out these in- 
tellectual foundations of mine, I should lapse for a 
moment or so towards autobiography. 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 359 

A convergence of circumstances led to my having my 
knowledge of concrete things quite extensively developed 
before I came to philosophical examination at all. I 
have heard some one say that a savage or an animal 
is mentally a purely objective being, and in that respect 
I was like a savage or an animal until I was well over 
twenty. I was extremely unaware of the subjective 
or introverted element in my being. I was a Positivist 
without knowing it. My early education was a feeble 
one ; it was one in which my private observation, 
inquiry and experiment were far more important factors 
than any instruction, or rather perhaps the instruction 
I received was less even than what I learnt for myself, 
and it terminated at thirteen. I had come into pretty 
intimate contact with the harder realities of life, with 
hunger in various forms, and many base and disagreeable 
necessities, before I was fifteen. About that age, 
following the indication of certain theological and 
speculative curiosities, I began to learn something of 
what I will call deliberately and justly, Elementary 
Science stuff I got out of CassdVs Popular Educator 
and cheap text-books and then, through accidents 
and ambitions that do not matter in the least to us 
now, I came to three years of illuminating and good 
scientific work. The central fact of those three years 
was Huxley's course in Comparative Anatomy at the 
school in Exhibition Road. About that as a nucleus 
I arranged a spacious digest of facts. At the end of 
that tune I had acquired what I still think to be a 
fairly clear, and complete and ordered view of the 

12 a 



360 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

ostensibly real universe. Let me try to give you the 
chief things I had. I had man definitely placed in 
the great scheme of space and time. I knew him in- 
curably for what he was, finite and not final, a being of 
compromises and adaptations. I had traced his lungs, 
for example, from a swimming bladder, step by step, 
with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, 
I had seen the ancestral caecum shrink to that disease 
nest, the appendix of to-day, I had watched the gill 
slit patched slowly to the purposes of the ear and the 
reptile jaw suspension utilised to eke out the needs 
of a sense organ taken from its native and natural 
water. I had worked out the development of those 
extraordinarily unsatisfactory and untrustworthy instru- 
ments, man's teeth, from the skin scutes of the shark 
to their present function as a basis for gold stoppings, 
and followed the slow unfolding of the complex and 
painful process of gestation through which man comes 
into the world. I had followed all these things arid 
many kindred things by dissection and in embryology 
I had checked the whole theory of development 
again in a year's course of palaeontology, and I had 
taken the dimensions of the whole process, by the scale 
of the stars, in a course cf astronomical physics. And 
all that amount of objective elucidation came before 
I had reached the beginnings of any philosophical or 
metaphysical inquiry, any inquiry as to why I believed, 
how I believed, what I believed, or what the funda- 
mental stuff of things was. 

Now following hard upon this interlude with know- 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 361 

ledge, came a time when I had to give myself to teach- 
ing, and it became advisable to acquire one of those 
Teaching Diplomas that are so widely and so foolishly 
despised, and that enterprise set me to a superficial, 
but suggestive study of educational method, of educa- 
tional theory, of logic, of psychology, and so at last, 
when the little affair with the diploma was settled, to 
philosophy. Now to come to logic over the bracing 
uplands of comparative anatomy is to come to logic 
with a lot of very natural preconceptions blown clean 
out of one's mind. It is, I submit, a way of taking 
logic in the flank. When you have realised to the 
marrow, that all the physical organs of man and all his 
physical structure are what they are through a series 
of adaptations and approximations, and that they are 
kept up to a level of practical efficiency only by the 
elimination of death, and that this is true also of his 
brain and of his instincts and of many of his mental 
predispositions, you are not going to take his thinking 
apparatus unquestioningly as being in any way mys- 
teriously different and better. And I had read only a 
little logic before I became aware of implications that 
I could not agree with, and assumptions that seemed 
to me to be altogether at variance with the general 
scheme of objective fact established in my mind. 

I came to an examination of logical processes and of 
language with the expectation that they would share the 
profoundly provisional character, the character of irregu- 
lar limitation and adaptation that pervades the whole 
physical and animal being of man. And I found the 



362 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

thing I had expected. And as a consequence I found 
a sort of intellectual hardihood about the assumptions 
of logic, that at first confused me and then roused all 
the latent scepticism in my mind. 

My first quarrel with the accepted logic I developed 
long ago in a little paper that was printed in the Fort- 
nightly Review in July, 1891. It was called the " Re- 
discovery of the Unique," and re-reading it I perceive 
not only how bad and even annoying it was in manner 
a thing I have long known but also how remarkably 
bad it was in expression. I have good reason for 
doubting whether my powers of expression in these 
uses have very perceptibly improved, but at any rate 
I am doing my best now with that previous failure be- 
fore me. 

That unfortunate paper, among other oversights I 
can no longer regard as trivial, disregarded quite com- 
pletely the fact that a whole literature upon the antag- 
onism of the one and the many, of the specific ideal 
and the individual reality, was already in existence. 
It defined no relations to other thought or thinkers. 
I understand now, what I did not understand then, 
why it was totally ignored. But the idea underlying 
that paper I cling to to-day. I consider it an idea 
that will ultimately be regarded as one of primary 
importance to human thought, and I will try and 
present the substance of that early paper again now 
very briefly, as the best opening of my general case. 
My opening scepticism is essentially a doubt of the 
objective reality of classification. I have no hesitation in 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 363 

saying that is the first and primary proposition of my 
philosophy. 

I have it in my mind that classification is a necessary 
condition of the working of the mental implement, but 
that it is a departure from the objective truth of things, 
that classification is very serviceable for the practical 
purposes of life but a very doubtful preliminary to those 
fine penetrations the philosophical purpose, in its more 
arrogant moods, demands. All the peculiarities of my 
way of thinking derive from that. 

A mind nourished upon anatomical study is of course 
permeated with the suggestion of the vagueness and 
instability of biological species. A biological species is 
quite obviously a great number of unique individuals 
which is separable from other biological species only 
by the fact that an enormous number of other linking 
individuals are inaccessible in time are in other words 
dead and gone and each new individual in that species 
does, in the distinction of its own individuality, break 
away in however infinitesimal degree from the previous 
average properties of the species. There is no property 
of any species, even the properties that constitute the 
specific^definition, that is not a matter of more or less. 
If, for example, a species be distinguished by a single 
large red spot on the back, you will find if you go over 
a great number of specimens that red spot shrinking 
here to nothing, expanding there to a more general 
redness, weakening to pink, deepening to russet and 
brown, shading into crimson, and so on, and so on. 
And this is true not only of biological species. It is 



364 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

true of the mineral specimens constituting a mineral 
species, and I remember as a constant refrain in the 
lectures of Prof. Judd upon rock classification, the words 
" they pass into one another by insensible gradations." 
That is true, I hold, of all things. 

You will think perhaps of atoms of the elements as 
instances of identically similar things, but these are 
things not of experience but of theory, and there is not a 
phenomenon in chemistry that is not equally well ex- 
plained on the supposition that it is merely the immense 
quantities of atoms necessarily taken in any experiment 
that mask by the operation of the law of averages the 
fact that each atom also has its unique quality, its 
special individual difference. This idea of uniqueness 
in all individuals is not only true of the classifications of 
material science ; it is true, and still more evidently 
true, of the species of common thought, it is true of 
common terms. Take the word chair. When one says 
chair, one thinks vaguely of an average chair. But 
collect individual instances, think of armchairs and 
reading chairs, and dining-room chairs and kitchen 
chairs, chairs that pass into benches, chairs that cross 
the boundary and become settees, dentists' chairs, 
thrones, opera stalls, seats of all sorts, those miraculous 
fungoid growths that cumber the floor of the Arts and 
Crafts Exhibition, and you will perceive what a lax 
bundle in fact is this simple straightforward term. In 
co-operation with an intelligent joiner I would under- 
take to defeat any definition of chair or chairishness 
that you gave me. Chairs just as much as individual 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 365 

organisms, just as much as mineral and rock specimens, 
are unique things if you know them well enough you 
will find an individual difference even in a set of machine- 
made chairs and it is only because we do not possess 
minds of unlimited capacity, because our brain has only 
a limited number of pigeon-holes for our correspondence 
with an unlimited universe of objective uniques, that 
we have to delude ourselves into the belief that there is 
a chairishness in this species common to and distinctive 
of all chairs. 

Let me repeat ; this is of the very smallest import- 
ance in all the practical affairs of life, or indeed in 
relation to anything but philosophy and wide generalisa- 
tions. But in philosophy it matters profoundly. If I 
order two new-laid eggs for breakfast, up come two 
unhatched but still unique avian individuals, and the 
chances are they serve my rude physiological purpose. 
I can afford to ignore the hens' eggs of the past that 
were not quite so nearly this sort of thing, and the hens' 
eggs of the future that will accumulate modification 
age by age ; I can venture to ignore the rare chance of 
an abnormality in chemical composition and of any 
startling aberration in my physiological reaction ; I can, 
with a confidence that is practically perfect, say with 
unqualified simplicity " two eggs," but not if my con- 
cern is not my morning's breakfast but the utmost 
possible truth. 

Now let me go on to point out whither this idea of 
uniqueness tends. I submit to you that syllogism is 
based on classification, that all hard logical reasoning 



366 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

tends to imply and is apt to imply a confidence in the 
objective reality of classification. Consequently in deny- 
ing that I deny the absolute validity of logic. Classifica- 
tion and number, which in truth ignore the fine differ- 
ences of objective realities, have in the past of human 
thought been imposed upon things. Let me for clear- 
ness' sake take a liberty here commit, as you may per- 
haps think, an unpardonable insolence. Hindoo thought 
and Greek thought alike impress me as being overmuch 
obsessed by an objective treatment of certain necessary 
preliminary conditions of human thought number and 
definition and class and abstract form. But these things, 
number, definition, class and abstract form, I hold, are 
merely unavoidable conditions of mental activity re- 
grettable conditions rather than essential facts. The 
forceps of our minds are clumsy forceps, and crush the 
truth a little in taking hold of it. 

It was about this difficulty that the mind of Plato 
played a little inconclusively all his life. For the most 
part he tended to regard the idea as the something 
behind reality, whereas it seems to me that the idea 
is the more proximate and less perfect thing, the thing 
by which the mind, by ignoring individual differences, 
attempts to comprehend an otherwise unmanageable 
number of unique realities. 

Let me give you a rough figure of what I am trying 
to convey in this first attack upon the philosophical 
validity of general terms. You have seen the results of 
those various methods of black and white reproduction 
that involve the use of a rectangular net. You know the 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 367 

sort of process picture I mean it used to be employed 
very frequently in reproducing photographs. At a little 
distance you really seem to have a faithful reproduction 
of the original picture, but when you peer closely you 
find not the unique form and masses of the original, but 
a multitude of little rectangles, uniform in shape and 
size. The more earnestly you go into the thing, the 
closer you look, the more the picture is lost in reticula- 
tions. I submit the world of reasoned inquiry has a 
very similar relation to the world I call objectively real. 
For the rough purposes of every day the net-work pic- 
ture will do, but the finer your purpose the less it will 
serve, and for an ideally fine purpose, for absolute and 
general knowledge that will be as true for a man at a 
distance with a telescope as for a man with a microscope 
it will not serve at all. 

It is true you can make your net of logical interpreta- 
tion finer and finer, you can fine your classification more 
and more up to a certain limit. But essentially you 
are working in limits, and as you come closer, as you 
look at finer and subtler things, as you leave the prac- 
tical purpose for which the method exists, the element of 
error increases. Every species is vague, every term goes 
cloudy at its edges, and so in my way of thinking, relent- 
less logic is only another phrase for a stupidity, for a 
sort of intellectual pigheadedness. If you push a philo- 
sophical or metaphysical inquiry through a series of 
valid syllogisms never committing any generally re- 
cognised fallacy you nevertheless leave a certain rub- 
bing and marginal loss of objective truth and you get 



368 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

deflections that are difficult to trace, at each phase in 
the process. Every species waggles about in its defini- 
tion, every tool is a little loose in its handle, every scale 
has its individual error. So long as you are reasoning 
for practical purposes about the finite things of experi- 
ence, you can every now and then check your process, 
and correct your adjustments. But not when you make 
what are called philosophical and theological inquiries, 
when you turn your implement towards the final absolute 
truth of things. Doing that is like firing at an inacces- 
sible, unmarkable and indestructible target at an un- 
known distance, with a defective rifle and variable cart- 
ridges. Even if by chance you hit, you cannot know 
that you hit, and so it will matter nothing at all. 

This assertion of the necessary untrustworthiness of 
all reasoning processes arising out of the fallacy of 
classification in what is quite conceivably a universe of 
uniques, forms only one introductory aspect of my 
general scepticism of the Instrument of Thought. 

I have now to tell you of another aspect of this scepti- 
cism of the instrument which concerns negative terms. 

Classes in logic are not only represented by circles 
with a hard firm outline, whereas they have no such 
definite limits, but also there is a constant disposition 
to think of negative terms as if they represented positive 
classes. With words just as with numbers and abstract 
forms there are definite phases of human development. 
There is, you know, with regard to number, the phase 
when man can barely count at all, or counts in perfect 
good faith and sanity upon his fingers. Then there is 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 369 

the phase when he is struggling with the development 
of number, when he begins to elaborate all sorts of ideas 
about numbers, until at last he develops complex super- 
stitions about perfect numbers and imperfect numbers, 
about threes and sevens and the like. The same is the 
case with abstracted forms, and even to-day we are 
scarcely more than heads out of the vast subtle muddle 
of thinking about spheres and ideally perfect forms and 
so on, that was the price of this little necessary step to 
clear thinking. You know better than I do how large 
a part numerical and geometrical magic, numerical and 
geometrical philosophy has played in the history of the 
mind. And the whole apparatus of language and mental 
communication is beset with like dangers. The language 
of the savage is, I suppose, purely positive ; the thing 
has a name, the name has a thing. This indeed is the 
tradition of language, and to-day even, we, when we 
hear a name, are predisposed and sometimes it is a very 
vicious disposition to imagine forthwith something 
answering to the name. We are disposed, as an incurable 
mental vice, to accumulate intension in terms. If I say to 
you Wodget or Crump, you find yourself passing over 
the fact that these are nothings, these are, so to speak, 
mere blankety blanks, and trying to think what sort of 
thing a Wodget or a Crump may be. And where this 
disposition has come in, in its most alluring guise, is 
in the case of negative terms. Our instrument of know- 
ledge persists in handling even such openly negative 
terms as the Absolute, the Infinite, as though they 
were real existences, and when the negative element 



370 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

is ever so little disguised, as it is in such a word as 
Omniscience, then the illusion of positive reality may be 
complete. 

Please remember that I am trying to tell you my 
philosophy, and not arguing about yours. Let me try 
and express how in my mind this matter of negative 
terms has shaped itself. I think of something which I 
may perhaps best describe as being off the stage or out 
of court, or as the Void without Implications, or as 
Nothingness or as Outer Darkness. This is a sort of 
hypothetical Beyond to the visible world of human 
thought, and thither I think all negative terms reach at 
last, and merge and become nothing. Whatever posi- 
tive class you make, whatever boundary you draw, 
straight away from that boundary begins the correspond- 
ing negative class and passes into the illimitable horizon 
of nothingness. You talk of pink things, you ignore, if 
you are a trained logician, the more elusive shades of 
pink, and draw your line. Beyond is the not pink, 
known and knowable, and still in the not pink region 
one comes to the Outer Darkness. Not blue, not happy, 
not iron, all the not classes meet in that Outer Darkness. 
That same Outer Darkness and nothingness is infinite 
space, and infinite time, and any being of infinite qualities, 
and all that region I rule out of court in my philosophy 
altogether. I will neither affirm nor deny if I can help it 
about any not things, I will not deal with not things 
at all, except by accident and inadvertence. If I use the 
word ' infinite ' I use it as one often uses ' countless,' 
" the countless hosts of the enemy " or ' immeasurable ' 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 371 

" immeasurable cliffs " that is to say as the limit of 
measurement rather than as the limit of imaginary 
measurability, as a convenient equivalent to as many 
times this cloth yard as you can, and as many again 
and so on and so on. Now a great number of apparently 
positive terms are, or have become, practically negative 
terms and are under the same ban with me. A consider- 
able number of terms that have played a great part in 
the world of thought, seem to me to be invalidated by 
this same defect, to have no content or an undefined 
content or an unjustifiable content. For example, that 
word Omniscient, as implying infinite knowledge, im- 
presses me as being a word with a delusive air of being 
solid and full, when it is really hollow with no content 
whatever. I am persuaded that knowing is the relation 
of a conscious being to something not itself, that the 
thing known is defined as a system of parts and aspects 
and relationships, that knowledge is comprehension, and 
so that only finite things can know or be known. When 
you talk of a being of infinite extension and infinite 
duration, omniscient and omnipotent and Perfect, you 
seem to me to be talking in negatives of nothing what- 
ever. When you speak of the Absolute you speak to 
me of nothing. If however you talk of a great yet finite 
and thinkable being, a being not myself, extending 
beyond my imagination in time and space, knowing all 
that I can think of as known and capable of doing all 
that I can think of as done, you come into the sphere 
of my mental operations, and into the scheme of my 
philosophy. . . . 



372 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

These then are my first two charges against our Instru- 
ment of Knowledge, firstly, that it can work only by 
disregarding individuality and treating uniques as identic- 
ally similar objects in this respect or that, so as to group 
them under one term, and that once it has done so it 
tends automatically to intensify the significance of that 
term, and secondly, that it can only deal freely with 
negative terms by treating them as though they were 
positive. But I have a further objection to the Instru- 
ment of Human Thought, that is not correlated to these 
former objections and that is also rather more difficult 
to convey. 

Essentially this idea is to present a sort of stratifica- 
tion in human ideas. I have it very much in mind that 
various terms in our reasoning lie, as it were, at different 
levels and in different planes, and that we accomplish 
a large amount of error and confusion by reasoning terms 
together that do not lie or nearly lie in the same plane. 

Let me endeavour to make myself a little less obscure 
by a most flagrant instance from physical things. Sup- 
pose some "one began to talk seriously of a man seeing 
an atom through a microscope, or better perhaps of 
cutting one in half with a knife. There are a number 
of non-analytical people who would be quite prepared 
to believe that an atom could be visible to the eye or 
cut in this manner. But any one at all conversant with 
physical conceptions would almost as soon think of 
killing the square root of 2 with a rook rifle as of cutting 
an atom in half with a knife. Our conception of an 
atom is reached through a process of hypothesis and 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 373 

analysis, and in the world of atoms there are no knives 
and no men to cut. If you have thought with a strong 
consistent mental movement, then when you have 
thought of your atom under the knife blade, your knife 
blade has itself become a cloud of swinging grouped 
atoms, and your microscope lens a little universe of 
oscillatory and vibratory molecules. If you think of 
the universe, thinking at the level of atoms, there is 
neither knife to cut, scale to weigh nor eye to see. The 
universe at that plane to which the mind of the molecular 
physicist descends has none of the shapes or forms of our 
common life whatever. This hand with which I write 
is in the universe of molecular physics a cloud of warring 
atoms and molecules, combining and recombining, collid- 
ing, rotating, flying hither and thither in the universal 
atmosphere of ether. 

You see, I hope, what I mean, when I say that the 
universe of molecular physics is at a different level from 
the universe of common experience ; what we call stable 
and solid is in that world a freely moving system of 
interlacing centres of force, what we call colour and 
sound is there no more than this length of vibration or 
that. We have reached to a conception of that universe 
of molecular physics by a great enterprise of organised 
analysis, and our universe of daily experiences stands in 
relation to that elemental world as if it were a synthesis 
of those elemental things. 

I would suggest to you that this is only a very extreme 
instance of the general state of affairs, that there may be 
finer and subtler differences of level between one term 



374 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

and another, and that terms may very well be thought 
of as lying obliquely and as being twisted through 
different levels. 

It will perhaps give a clearer idea Of what I am seek- 
ing to convey if I suggest a concrete image for the whole 
world of a man's thought and knowledge. Imagine a 
large clear jelly, in which at all angles and in all states 
of simplicity or contortion his ideas are imbedded. They 
are all valid and possible ideas as they lie, none in reality 
incompatible with any. If you imagine the direction of 
up or down in this clear jelly being as it were the direc- 
tion in which one moves by analysis or by synthesis, if 
you go down for example from matter to atoms and 
centres of force and up to men and states and countries 
if you will imagine the ideas lying in that manner you 
will get the beginning of my intention. But our Instru- 
ment, our process of thinking, like a drawing before the 
discovery of perspective, appears to have difficulties with 
the third dimension, appears capable only of dealing 
with or reasoning about ideas by projecting them upon 
the same plane. It will be obvious that a great multi- 
tude of things may very well exist together in a solid 
jelly, which would be overlapping and incompatible and 
mutually destructive, when projected together upon one 
plane. Through the bias in our Instrument to do this, 
through reasoning between terms not in the same plane, 
an enormous amount of confusion, perplexity and mental 
deadlocking occurs. 

The old theological deadlock between predestination 
and free-will serves admirably as an example of the sort 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 375 

of deadlock I mean. Take life at the level of common 
sensation and common experience and there is no more 
indisputable fact than man's freedom of will, unless it 
is his complete moral responsibility. But make only 
the least penetrating of analyses and you perceive a 
world of inevitable consequences, a rigid succession of 
cause and effect. Insist upon a flat agreement between 
the two, and there you are ! The Instrument fails. 

It is upon these three objections, and upon an extreme 
suspicion of abstract terms which arises materially out 
of my first and second objections, that I chiefly rest my 
case for a profound scepticism of the remoter possibilities 
of the Instrument of Thought. It is a thing no more 
perfect than the human eye or the human ear, though 
like those other instruments it may have undefined 
possibilities of evolution towards increased range, and 
increased power. 

So much for my main contention. But before I con- 
clude I may since I am here say a little more in the 
autobiographical vein, and with a view to your dis- 
cussion to show how I reconcile this fundamental scepti- 
cism with the very positive beliefs about world-wide 
issues I possess, and the very definite distinction I make 
between right and wrong. 

I reconcile these things by simply pointing out to you 
that if there is any validity in my image of that three 
dimensional jelly in which our ideas are suspended, such 
a reconciliation as you demand in logic, such a projection 
of the things as in accordance upon one plane, is totally 
unnecessary and impossible. 



376 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

Tliis insistence upon the element of uniqueness in 
being, this subordination of the class to the individual 
difference, not only destroys the universal claim of phil- 
osophy, but the universal claim of ethical imperatives, the 
universal claim of any religious teaching. If you press me 
back upon my fundamental position I must confess I put 
faith and standards and rules of conduct upon exactly the 
same level as I put my belief of what is right in art, and 
what I consider right practice in art. I have arrived at 
a certain sort of self-knowledge and there are, I find, very 
distinct imperatives for me, but I am quite prepared to 
admit there is no proving them imperative on any one 
else. One's political proceedings, one's moral acts are, I 
hold, just as much self-expression as cne's poetry or 
painting or music. But since life has for its primordial 
elements assimilation and aggression, I try not only to 
obey my imperatives, but to put them persuasively and 
convincingly into other minds, to bring about my good 
and to resist and overcome my evil as though they were 
the universal Good and the universal Evil in which un- 
thinking men believe. And it is obviously in no way 
contradictory to this philosophy, for me, if I find others 
responding sympathetically to any notes of mine or if 
I find myself responding sympathetically to notes sound- 
ing about me, to give that common resemblance between 
myself and others a name, to refer these others and my- 
self in common to this thing as if it were externalised 
and rpanned us all. 

Scepticism of the Instrument is for example not in- 
compatible with religious association and with organisa- 



SCEPTICISM OF THE INSTRUMENT. 377 

tion upon the basis of a common faith. It is possible to 
regard God as a Being synthetic in relation to men and 
societies, just as the idea of a universe of atoms and 
molecules and inorganic relationships is analytical in re- 
lation to human life. 

The repudiation of demonstration in any but immedi- 
ate and verifiable cases that this Scepticism of the Instru- 
ment amounts to, the abandonment of any universal 
validity for moral and religious propositions, brings 
ethical, social and religious teaching into the province 
of poetry, and does something to correct the estrange- 
ment between knowledge and beauty that is a feature 
of so much mental existence at this time. All these 
things are self-expression. Such an opinion sets a new 
and greater value on that penetrating and illuminating 
quality of mind we call insight, insight which when it 
faces towards the contradictions that arise out of the 
imperfections of the mental instrument is called humour. 
In these innate, unteachable qualities I hold in humour 
and the sense of beauty lies such hope of intellectual 
salvation from the original sin of our intellectual instru- 
ment as we may entertain in this uncertain and fluctuat- 
ing world of unique appearances. . . . 

So frankly I spread my little equipment of fundamental 
assumptions before you, heartily glad of the opportunity 
you have given me of taking them out, of looking at 
them with the particularity the presence of hearers en- 
sures, and of hearing the impression they make upon 
you. Of course such a sketch must have an inevitable 
crudity of effect. The time I had for it I mean the 



378 A MODERN UTOPIA. 

time I was able to give in preparation was altogether 
too limited for any exhaustive finish of presentation ; 
but I think on the whole I have got the main lines of 
this sketch map of my mental basis true. Whether I 
have made myself comprehensible is a different question 
altogether. It is for you rather than me to say how 
this sketch map of mine lies with regard to your own 
more systematic cartography. . . . 

Here followed certain comments upon Personal Idealism, and Mr. 
F. C. S. Schiller's Humanism, of no particular value. 



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Wells, Herbert George 
A modern utopia 



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